Tag Archive for: Georgetown University

The IEI and Ariane Tabatabai’s Controversy

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Exploring the IEI’s Global Influence and the Enigma Surrounding Tabatabai’s Role.

In the world of international diplomacy, secrets have a way of unraveling. Leaked emails and reports have recently unveiled a clandestine Iranian operation known as the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI). This covert endeavor, designed to cultivate support for Iran’s nuclear program, has sent shockwaves through the corridors of power. But that’s just the beginning.

Within this revelation, another thread has emerged — the involvement of key figures from the Biden administration with the IEI. This revelation raises profound questions about foreign influence and its implications on U.S. policy.

The IEI, previously shrouded in secrecy, has now been exposed for what it is – a covert Iranian operation. Its primary objective? To garner international support for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This revelation adds a new layer of complexity to the ongoing global discussions about Iran’s nuclear program.

The involvement of Biden administration aides with the IEI is a central theme. These individuals, working within the highest echelons of the U.S. government, had ties to the IEI. The nature of these links and their implications on U.S. policy decisions remain under scrutiny.

The IEI was not limited to a single sphere of influence. It infiltrated academia, leveraging the credibility of scholars to propagate its agenda. Meanwhile, sympathetic journalists played their part, shaping public perception subtly. Think tanks, known for their role in policymaking, were strategically targeted. Case studies vividly illustrate the IEI’s success in influencing policy decisions. And it didn’t stop there; former government officials transitioning into advocacy roles created conflicts and ethical dilemmas that continue to raise eyebrows.

The Biden administration’s approach to Iran stands in stark contrast to previous administrations. It is marked by a commitment to re-engage with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a notable departure from the aggressive stance of the past. This shift in policy has not only raised eyebrows. Still, it has caused genuine concern among policymakers and the public, who worry about potential risks and the implications of this new direction, making it a central point of debate in the broader context of U.S. foreign policy.

Amidst these revelations, the potential for undue influence on U.S. policy looms large. The need to mitigate foreign impact is paramount, echoing concerns about the integrity of policymaking. It’s a complex issue with no easy answers.

Ariane Tabatabai’s Controversy

As this international intrigue unfolds, Ariane Tabatabai, a former Georgetown University security studies professor and current senior adviser to the U.S. Department of Defense, finds herself at the center of a heated controversy. Genuine concern has arisen regarding her purported ties to Iranian regime influence networks and her security clearance.

The acquisition of her security clearance remains a shadowy enigma, with scant details emerging. Yet, one report suggests that her connections to the Islamic Republic networks managed to evade detection during the clearance process.

The security clearance saga erupted in April 2021 when a group of U.S. lawmakers demanded the revocation of Tabatabai’s clearance, citing her involvement in an “Iranian influence network” that they believed endangered national security.

Fast forward to September 2023, and Republican lawmakers intensify the call. They demand an investigation into Islamic Republic-backed influence operations on U.S. soil, advocating the suspension of clearances for officials, including Tabatabai, potentially swayed by these networks.

In response, Tabatabai can only refute these allegations. She tries to label them “baseless and unfounded,” portraying them as part of a “smear campaign” orchestrated by lawmakers seeking to undermine the Biden administration’s diplomacy with Iran’s regime, yet providing no clear explanations for the accusations.

And yet, despite the ongoing furor, Tabatabai’s security clearance endures as of September 2023, and surprisingly, she remains a senior adviser within the U.S. Department of Defense.

It’s not just her alleged ties to Iran’s regime influence networks that have been scrutinized. The accusations against her are part of a broader discourse surrounding U.S. policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran. Some U.S. officials and lawmakers contend that the Biden administration’s stance is overly lenient, failing to adequately support the Iranian people’s battle for democracy and human rights. Conversely, others advocate for diplomatic engagement and peaceful resolution in the U.S.-Iran relationship.

This exposure of the Iran Experts Initiative raises critical questions about foreign influence on U.S. policy. Whether through academia, media, think tanks, or former officials, vigilance is imperative to maintain the integrity of U.S. policymaking in a complex and interconnected world.

As for Ariane Tabatabai’s security clearance acquisition remains opaque, while her ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran influence networks kindle a political storm. Lawmakers’ calls for revocation have yet to bear fruit, and she continues her work at the U.S. Department of Defense. This controversy also mirrors broader debates on U.S. policy towards Iran, illustrating today’s complexity of international diplomacy.

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Georgetown Professor — Islamic Slavery is Freedom?

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“Slavery cannot be intrinsically evil in Islamic law,” Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown stated during a July 20, 2020 webinar. This disturbing assessment came during a 2019-2020 series of presentations on his 2019 book, Slavery & Islam, whose theses have hardly improved upon this Muslim convert’s past scandalous comments on slavery.

On February 7, 2017, Brown had caused furor while presenting a paper on slavery and Islam at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Thereby he noted the traditional Islamic doctrine expressed in Quran 33:21 that Islam’s prophet Muhammad is an “excellent pattern” of behavior. Therefore this example sanctified the slavery practiced by him and his companions, including sex slavery, a doctrine that had justified slavery throughout Islamic history.

Once public, such views completely negated Brown’s disclaimer at the presentation’s beginning. “I always make some hyperbolic statement that really makes sense in the context,” he noted, such that he would face accusations of “calling for slavery.” Given such concern over criticism, he expelled this author from the presentation before it started.

Brown’s elaboration of his views during his subsequent book tour has been hardly more reassuring, for slavery is “simply a fact of life in the Quran” and perhaps even “part of the DNA of Islam.” “Every area of Islamic law is permeated by slavery,” something that “sharia, without exception until the 20th-century, validated.” Muslim scholars have even speculated about a “time when the laws of slavery will actually be needed again,” such as in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like world, he has noted.

For centuries, “Muslims were neck-deep in the trade of slaves,” Brown has observed. As others have estimated, this trade included 17 million black Africans, more than the 12 million taken to the Western Hemisphere in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Ghanaian historian John Azumah has noted, while the transatlantic trade enslaved mostly men for labor, Muslim slavers favored seizing women for use as sex slave concubines.

In this regard, Brown has unsettlingly reprised his 2017 comments on sex slavery. Thus any norm that sex be consensual “is fairly unusual in world history.” This corresponds to Islamic doctrine’s proprietary understanding of female sexuality, which, he has noted, denies any recognition of rape in marriage.

Slavery in Islam is faith-based, Brown has explained. Under sharia the “only way that someone can lose their freedom is if they are a non-Muslim who lives outside the Muslim state and is then captured by Muslims.” Slavery therefore “is a reduction in legal status that is caused by unbelief,” whose “vestigial effect” can remain even for an enslaved convert to Islam or a child born into slavery.

Yet Brown has argued that Islam is “obsessed with emancipation.” Islamic doctrine’s numerous biases towards freeing slaves, such as a means to expiate sin, means that Islam “does not have an equal in any religious or philosophical tradition” from the premodern world. “The Quran and Sunna are unprecedently adamant about emancipation.”

However this emancipation should not help a slave return to unbelief in Islam. “Freedom is not the most important thing in Islamic law,” Brown has noted, although Muslim scholars have historically argued that “slavery is intrinsically harmful.” Rather, true freedom comes from submission to Islam, an “emancipatory force.” Seventh-century Arab Muslim conquerors, for example, before subjugating the Persians, announced that they would be free only as “slaves of God alone.”

Correspondingly, Brown has described Islamic civilization as a “vacuum cleaner, just sucking in people.” Muslim scholars have historically advocated enslavement of non-Muslims as a means of introducing them to Islam. Then “Muslims are always manumitting slaves, which means they need new slaves,” in an “emancipation turbine.”

Brown has correctly described how Christians led the revolutionary movement against a once universal acceptance of slavery to create the “abolitionist consensus that is held worldwide today.” “Muslims talking about the issue of slavery and abolition of slavery doesn’t happen until they encounter essentially Western abolitionism,” a development true of the Westerners themselves. In his assessment, Christians had in the process to “desacralize scripture” in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament with its numerous references to forms of servitude.

Jewish rabbis and scholars would beg to differ with Brown, for as McGill University Professor David Aberbach has written, “Judaism is intrinsically an abolitionist religion.” “In Jewish belief, every human life matters.” Contrary to superficial readings, Rabbi Dov Linzer has noted, the “Torah only accepts slavery as a deeply entrenched societal institution.”

The late Jewish sage Rabbi Jonathan Sacks delved into this deeper understanding of the Torah’s position of slavery. God’s intends “slavery is to be abolished, but it is a fundamental principle of God’s relationship with us that he does not force us to change faster than we are able to do so of our own free will.” Nonetheless, in the “Torah’s value system the exercise of power by one person over another, without their consent, is a fundamental assault against human dignity.”

This analysis requires that non-Jews such as Brown properly understand Jewish scripture. “Jews have always read the Torah through a rabbinic interpretive lens and not simply on the plain meaning of its words,” the website My Jewish Learning has observed. Thus Jews cannot “read every mitzvah as an ideal” that allows for no further development, Linzer has cautioned.

Accordingly, in various stipulations the “Torah indeed sees slavery as a problematic phenomenon,” Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of Jerusalem’s Western Wall and holy sites has noted. “Although it sanctions the institution of slavery, biblical law begins the process toward abolition,” University of Waterloo Professor James A. Diamond has observed. “Rules limiting slavery challenged the way society was built and prompted Jews to question an institution perhaps so natural it was invisible,” Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner has confirmed.

The Torah’s restrictive regulation of slavery indeed manifested a Jewish “light to the Gentiles” in the ancient slave-holding world. As the Chabad-Lubavitch organization has noted:

At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.

Particularly the Bible’s Exodus narrative of Jews escaping bondage in Egypt imprints upon Jewish consciousness emancipation’s value. Diamond has noted that the Passover “commemorates the exodus, anchoring the relationship between God and Israel as Liberator and slave.” As Sacks commented, “Jews were the people commanded never to forget the bitter taste of slavery so that they would never take freedom for granted.”

Tellingly, Brown has noted that Islamic tradition rejects the Torah’s narrative of a gracious God emancipating Jews in ancient Egypt and equates them with Muhammad’s early Muslim followers in pagan Mecca. “The Muslims in Mecca are like the Jews in Egypt, but they are not slaves, they are oppressed.” Thus the Israelite exodus “is not a story of emancipation, it’s a story of victory over oppression,” symbolizing Islam’s triumph.

The contrast between beliefs held by Muslims such as Brown and the Judeo-Christian tradition clearly indicates why Muslims have struggled to reject slavery. Confronted with this moral evil, Muslim reformers have argued that slavery is an artifact of jihadist doctrines inapplicable in modernity, or that rulers have discretionary power to prohibit human bondage. Nonetheless, Brown has recalled that jihadists going to Muslims’ defense during Bosnia’s 1990s sectarian carnage had asked Saudi clerics about taking slaves, only to hear warnings that this would create bad publicity.

These Islamic realities reflect Brown’s moral relativism. Although the Ottoman Empire’s slave trade “was undeniably brutal,” he has argued that slavery and other often onerous labor relations such as indentured servitude have widely varied across human history. Following therefore his dubious claim that slavery is not really objectively definable, any slavery-induced “disgust is a cultural construct” and “just custom; it’s just urf.” By analogy, he has noted that China’s brutal dog meat trade horrifies many non-Chinese, although increasing domestic opposition to dog meat consumption undermines his cultural relativism arguments.

Despite grappling with slavery’s moral problems for Islam’s legitimacy, Brown has failed to find a solution. In recent years Islamic State jihadists in their mercifully brief caliphate have “really caused a crisis for young Muslims” by piously invoking Islamic canons to justify the enslavement of Mesopotamia’s non-Muslims. But as the foregoing analysis has proven, he is wrong to claim in Islam’s tu quoque defense that slavery’s abolition “is not indigenous to any religion or any philosophy.”

Contrary to traditional Islamic understandings of an aloof, arbitrary Allah, the biblical God’s natural law ultimately revealed slavery’s injustice to Jews, Christians, and the wider world. Church historian John B. Carpenter has noted as much in the relationship of America’s famed escaped slave and 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglas to the Jew Jesus Christ:

Christianity’s commitment to freedom was so pronounced that Frederick Douglass, who decried the hypocrisy of slave-holding religion vividly, did not convert to Islam and become “Frederick X,” but professed, “I love the religion of our blessed Savior.”

While Brown’s exculpation for slavery in Islamic doctrine is unconvincing, he has nonetheless provided valuable insight into this previously “taboo subject.” As Azumah has written, a “critical approach is reserved for the Christian past but forbidden for the Muslim past.” However inadvertently and awkwardly, Brown has helped uncover Islam’s dark slavery legacy.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column and video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why are the loudest proponents of ‘tolerance’ and ‘peace’ so frequently ugly, hateful people?

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Not physically ugly, but ugly deep in their souls. Georgetown University professor Christine Fair happened upon neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who is not me, at a gym and began berating him. The gym then revoked Richard Spencer’s membership. I have no regard for Richard Spencer, as often as I am confused with him (even in the comments at National Review on this piece, some clown says that the article should have highlighted Richard Spencer’s remarks on white nationalism, not his criticism of Islam; in reality, he is the one who writes about white nationalism, and I am the one who writes about Islam, and we are two completely different people): he has more than once demanded that I reveal my “real” name, as he is convinced that I am secretly a Jew who has changed my name to fool good white folks like him.

So while I have nothing but disgust for Richard Spencer, I have even greater disgust for Christine Fair, who in this incident showed herself to be more of a Nazi than Richard Spencer could ever hope to be. Like the Nazis, she wants those whom she hates destroyed, full stop. Just destroyed. She doesn’t want them to be able to speak in public. She doesn’t want them to be able to hold memberships in gyms. She doesn’t want them to be allowed to live in the city she lives in. She doesn’t want them to breathe. This is quintessentially Nazi behavior, and is in direct contradiction to the principles that make a society free.

While Richard Spencer is indeed a Nazi, albeit in a different way from how Fair is one, and there is no excuse for that, as long as he is not breaking any laws he has as much right to be in that gym as Christine Fair has. But not as far as Christine Fair is concerned. She has apparently not reflected upon the precedent she is setting, or on the possibility, as remote as it is, that one day her views could be out of favor, and she could find herself getting poisoned, and forbidden to speak, and screamed at by campus fascists, and driven out of gyms, and the like, and that a healthier and freer society allows for the freedom of expression and doesn’t persecute or hound those whose ideas are unpopular or even unarguably obnoxious.

National Review writer Jeremy Carl brings me into this because I have been on the receiving end of Fair’s wrath before, and have found her to be a shockingly rude, unkind, angry, and remarkably unpleasant individual — all while she preens as an exponent of “tolerance” and “peace.” Carl is a bit hasty, in my view, to accept the claims of my critics without evaluating those claims or my work on their merits, but his anxiousness to distance himself from me is perhaps understandable in a piece that appears in the publication that Ann Coulter so famously observed years ago was run by “girly men.”

I would happily debate Jeremy Carl, or Christine Fair, or any serious analyst on the nature of Islam or any of the assertions I have made in my work, and I am confident that the claims about my work that Carl so readily embraces here would, in that event, be proven false. It’s certain, however, that neither Carl nor Fair will agree to debate me, and so that is that. Whatever the undeniable flaws of Carl’s piece, he is dead-on about the Left’s increasing authoritarianism and thuggery. Mark my words: I won’t be the last enemy of the Left that Leftists will try to kill.

Addendum: I just noticed that in her hate screed against Richard Spencer in the Washington Post, Christine Fair cites as factual the thoroughly discredited study claiming that “right-wing extremists” pose a greater threat than Islamic jihadists. This is what an academic is today: not a thinking individual, but a propagandist for the hard-Left.

Georgetown University professor Christine Fair

“Liberal Bullies Threaten Free Speech,” by Jeremy Carl, National Review, May 24, 2017:

…Let’s stipulate that Richard Spencer is a man who has embraced values that are anathema to America’s, and that his vision is quite obviously not one that conservatives or Republicans share. But Fair publicly claims that Spencer’s very presence in the gym, because of his political views, creates an oppressive environment, which is a much more dramatic and potentially dangerous claim. If you are still cheering on Professor Fair, consider the case of another Spencer — Robert Spencer (no relation to Richard), a persistent critic of political Islam and a favorite of Steve Bannon and other figures in the Trump administration.After he spoke to a large audience last week in Reykjavik, Iceland, a leftist approached him as he was dining with companions and managed to slip a combination of MDMA (“Ecstasy”) and Ritalin into his drink, causing him to become ill to the point that he was hospitalized. Fortunately, police seem to have identified the perpetrator. But despite Spencer’s relative prominence and the dramatic nature of the crime, this political poisoning attracted almost no attention from the mainstream media.

As Spencer put it ruefully, “The lesson I learned was that media demonization of those who dissent from the leftist line is a direct incitement to violence. By portraying me and others who raise legitimate questions about jihad terror and Sharia oppression as racist, bigoted ‘Islamophobes’ without allowing us a fair hearing, they paint a huge target on the backs of those who dare to dissent.”

Spencer, the author of two New York Times bestsellers on radical Islam, is certainly controversial — and has his fair share of critics even on the right. But one should be able to be controversial without being poisoned. In the wake of the bombings in Manchester, are critics of political Islam really the people who should be beyond the pale of civil discourse?

hat does all this have to do with Professor Fair? Well, it turns out that Robert Spencer too has had his share of run-ins with Professor Fair, who according to Spencer called him a “lunatic” and likened him to Charles Manson while “refusing (of course) to debate me on questions of substance.” Robert Spencer says he has never met Fair in person, which has not saved him from being a repeated target of Fair’s ire.

Very well, you may say, but Spencer’s harsh and cherry-picked criticism of Islam may have stirred up legitimate anger — there’s no reason to defend him.

Well, how about Asra Nomani, a liberal Muslim immigrant woman, former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Georgetown professor who committed the mortal sin (to Christine Fair) of voting for Donald Trump and then writing a piece in the Washington Post explaining her decision. In response, she was brutally harassed by Professor Fair on Twitter for the better part of a month. As Nomani subsequently wrote to Georgetown in a formal complaint against Fair: “Prof. Fair has directed hateful, vulgar and disrespectful messages to me, including the allegations that I am: a ‘fraud’; ‘fame-mongering clown show’; and a ‘bevkuf,’ or ‘idiot,’ in my native Urdu, who has ‘pimped herself out’ . . . this last allegation amounts to ‘slut-shaming.’”

But while a quick perusal of Fair’s public statements reveals her to be an extreme case, a virtual parody of liberal intolerance, she is hardly the only liberal behaving badly. In just the past year, many conservatives, libertarians, and other assorted right-wingers, from Ann Coulter to Charles Murray to Heather Mac Donald to Milo Yiannopoulos to Ben Shapiro, have been shouted down and prevented, often by violence, from sharing their views, most often on America’s campuses. And so far, almost without exception, those universities have declined to give any significant punishment to the perpetrators. It is all well and good for conservatives to point out that there is a yawning gap between the Richard Spencers of the world and the Charles Murrays and Heather Mac Donalds. But for the Christine Fairs of the world — and an increasing number of her ideological soulmates on the left — they are all the same. None should have the right to speak — and increasingly, they are not even free to lead private lives free of harassment and threats. All of the people named above have been called “Nazis,” “white supremacists,” and similar epithets. If the Right, through silence, decides it’s okay to harass or physically attack Richard Spencer because he is a “Nazi” (a video clip of an Antifa member sucker-punching Spencer has become a favorite Internet meme on the left), they should not expect that the punchers will stop at Richard Spencer — or Robert Spencer, or even Asra Nomani. If we won’t fight for the free speech of those who anger the Left, no matter how distasteful we find their views, because we are afraid that the Left will wrongly ascribe their views to us, then conservatives are little more than feeding red meat to the ravenous left-wing lion in vain hopes that they will be the last ones eaten. And the lion is getting stronger and hungrier.

In his comments on Fair, written long before his poisoning incident, Robert Spencer wondered, “Why are the loudest proponents of ‘tolerance’ and ‘peace’ so frequently ugly, hateful people?” It’s a question the Left doesn’t want to answer — and too many on the right, afraid of being labeled as bigots by the most intolerant voices on the left, are scared to even ask.

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Does Obama’s Presidential Directive Mandate Outreach to Islamists?

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Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council State Department 1-1-27-15(1)

Waleed Sharaby, Secretary General of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council Flashes Rabia MB resistance sign. U.S. State Department Jan. 27, 2015 Source: Facebook screenshot.

Our NER colleague Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein has called Obama, “the most radical American President, ever”. That was in an interview we conducted with him in 2010 that went viral on YouTube. One of the reasons for Dr. Rubenstein’s assessment was the extent to which the President had surrounded himself with like minded senior staff and advisers who condoned outreach to the Muslim Ummah. That was evident early in his first Administration given a trip to Ankara in April 2009, followed by his address at Cairo University in June where he declared a new foreign policy accommodating the concept of Islamist Democracy.  Dr. Rubenstein’s major book on Jihad and Genocide elucidated the anti-Democratic underpinning of Qur’anic doctrine.  Especially concerning him were the Muslim Brotherhood and derivatives, Al Qaeda, Hamas and the Shia Mahdist apocalyptic doctrine espoused by the Islamic Regime in Iran.  A revolutionary Islamist regime bent on achieving nuclear hegemony and possible destruction of Israel.  He also ascribed the President’s willingness to accommodate these views because of his early introduction to Islam as the adopted son of an Indonesian oil executive in his late mother’s second marriage. Rubenstein’s prescient analysis depicted President Obama accommodating Islamist movements as a peculiar form of demopathy, using both violent and civilizational jihad.  That is reflected in his Presidential Policy and Study Directives.

Dan Greenfield  delved into the underpinnings of the Obama radical accommodation of Islamism in a Frontpage Magazine article published on June 8, 2015 entitled, “Directive 11: Obama’s Secret Islamist Plan”:

Directive 11 brought together activists and operatives at multiple agencies to come up with a “tailored” approach for regime change in each country. The goal was to “manage” the political transitions. It tossed aside American national security interests by insisting that Islamist regimes would be equally committed to fighting terrorism and cooperating with Israel. Its greatest gymnastic feat may have been arguing that the best way to achieve political stability in the region was through regime change.

What little we know about the resulting classified 18-page report is that it used euphemisms to call for aiding Islamist takeovers in parts of the Middle East. Four countries were targeted. Of those four, we only know for certain that Egypt and Yemen were on the list. But we do know for certain the outcome.

Egypt fell to the Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with Al Qaeda, Hamas and Iran, before being undone by a counterrevolution. Yemen is currently controlled by Iran’s Houthi terrorists and Al Qaeda.

We have witnessed what the secretive Presidential Directive 11 has achieved in public and private meetings with radical Muslim Brotherhood clerics and leaders, both during and following the Arab Spring revolt in these countries from 2010 to the present. To facilitate the objectives of Directive 11 Obama had brought onto his White House and Department staffs members of MB affiliates in the US. He also reached out to academic centers promoting the views that there were “good Islamists”. Groups like the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy  at Georgetown University, headed by Prof. John Esposito, funded in part by the State Department.  After a New York Federal Appeals court decision in 2009, the Administration lifted a visa ban inviting Oxford University Professor Tariq Ramadan, a grandson of the founder of the MB, Hassan al Banna, to participate in CSID forums and take an endowed Chair at Notre Dame University.

Egypt elected in June 2012 an Islamist government headed by former Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi that sought to impose Sharia law on the Constitution. The Morsi government stealthily backed MB jihad pogroms against the Coptic Christian minority burning churches, destroying businesses, murdering men, raping and forcing conversion on female victims.  Ironically, Morsi’s Defense Minister, Col. Gen. Abdel Fattah Al- Sisi rejected Islamism and led a coup on July 3, 2013 jailing and prosecuting hundreds of Muslim Brother leaders including Morsi.  Many of whom, including Morsi are now awaiting possible death sentences for a massive jail break that freed them in January 2011.  Al Sisi in a dramatic January 2015 speech at Al Azhar University raised the matter of reform of Qur’an doctrine before an audience composed of leading Sunni clerics at Al Azhar University in Cairo.  Despite this Egyptian counter-revolution both the US National  Security Staff and State Department  invited former Muslim Brotherhood  Morsi regime political figures and clerics to assist in developing ‘messaging’ to contend with  Al Qaeda,  its affiliates and the self-declared  Islamic  State. We wrote about those instances in NER articles and Iconoclast blogs. What follows are the latest episodes arising from Obama’s Presidential Directive 11.  One concerns the withdrawal of funding of a US backed program seeking to create an alternative Shia civil polity to Iranian proxy Hezbollah that dominates Lebanon.  The other concerns the kerfuffle surrounding meetings of Muslim Brotherhood leaders in both January 2015 at the State Department and private meetings at the CSID in Washington this June.

U.S. withdrew aid to Lebanese Shia NGO seeking to extricate them from the clutches of Hezbollah. 

Lebanon next door to Israel appears to be dominated by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah that has infiltrated the country’s military.  This is a disheartening failure in the wake of the 2005 Cedars Revolution in Lebanon prompted by the assassination of Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. Hariri was assassinated by Syrian intelligence agents of the Assad régime.  With the plummeting Christian population in Lebanon, demise of the former Amal Shia militia, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah filled the vacuum backed with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual support from Iran. An Iran that delivered hundreds of thousands of weapons, coupled with North Korean expertise building tunnels and fortifications in Sothern Lebanon. Nasrallah’s recklessness triggered the Second Lebanon War in 2006 with the abduction and murder of two Israeli IDF reservists.

Despite Hezbollah’s control over Lebanon there had been a limited US program seeking to arouse Shia opposition to Hezbollah through the auspices of the State Department funded International Republican Institute (IRI), chaired by US. Senator John McCain, (R-AZ).  IRI, like the International Democratic Institute counterpart, seeks to advance democracy abroad.  Both Institutes are outgrowths of the successful program in the 1980s that toppled the Polish Communist regime with church and Solidarity Movement support.  Unfortunately, in the wake of the Arab Spring  both Institutes had  been involved in training  candidates for the predominately Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist dominated Egyptian parliament elected  with now  ousted  President  Mohammed Morsi  in June 2012.  They were subsequently purged when the Morsi regime was overthrown a year later in July 2013 in a coup led by now Egyptian President Al-Sisi.

The Lebanese anti-Nasrallah Hayya Bina Shia program, funded by the IRI, lost US funding that it had received since 2007. According to the Wall Street Journal, it received $640,000 between June 2013 and December 2015.  The IRI notified Hayya Bina director Lokman Slim in April 2015 that the Obama Administration was terminating its support for the program.  The letter Slim received from the IRI read, “the State Department requests that all activities intended [to] foster an independent moderate Shia voice be ceased immediately and indefinitely”.  Could it be that as Obama moves closer to Iran and its proxy Hezbollah given the looming P5+1 nuclear agreement, that it will brook no local dissent in Lebanon among the Shia?  That should not be surprising.  Obama’s Middle East policy czar, Robert Malley, during his stint at the Soros-funded International Crisis Group held discussions with Hezbollah. Despite the later being on the State Department list of designated terrorist organizations.

Egypt objects to continuing Muslim Brotherhood Washington visits with U.S. officials

The Egyptian government has been angered by continued meetings of former Muslim Brotherhood leaders with State Department funded groups and, in some instances, with White House National Security staff.   In January 2015, the State Department hosted a visiting delegation of Muslim Brotherhood leaders from the former Morsi government.  Prior to and following his ouster, the White House National Security team and the State Department met with Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood clerics and legislator who was a former terrorist.

On June 8, 2015 the Egyptian foreign ministry requested an audience with US Ambassador to Cairo R. Stephen Beecroft  to express concern and outrage at the visit of another Muslim Brotherhood delegation to Washington.    State Department Jeff Rathke  spokesperson  was peppered  with  questions by  journalists at  Daily Press Briefings on both June 9th and 10th, about the Cairo foreign ministry  meetings with Ambassador Beecroft  and private meetings in Washington  at  the (CSID).  Rathke responded to one such question saying:

Well, again, we’ve met with this group in the past. We haven’t changed our policy. We will continue to meet with groups across the political spectrum. No – but we don’t have any plans to meet with this group at this particular time.

Watch this C-Span video clip of a June 9, 2015 State Department Daily Press Briefing with Press Spokesman Jeff Rathke in an exchange with journalists:

John Rossomando in an Investigative Project on Terrorism article noted the members of the Muslim Brotherhood delegation and the involvement of the CSID:

Egypt sought the recent meeting with Ambassador Stephen Beecroft to show its displeasure with American policy toward the Brotherhood, which it labels a terrorist organization.

Delegation members include Amr Darrag, whose handling of drafting and ratifying Egypt’s December 2012 constitution led to fears the Brotherhood aimed to impose a theocracy; and Wael Haddara, a Canadian Brotherhood member who served as an adviser to deposed President Mohamed Morsi.

Referencing the earlier January meetings, the IPT article noted:

Emails obtained by Middle East Briefing, a publication of the Dubai-based Orient Advisory Group, show that since 2010, Obama administration policy sought to support the Muslim Brotherhood under Presidential Study Directive 11.

State Department and White House officials met in January with a Muslim Brotherhood delegation whose trip had been partly funded by the Brotherhood-linked group Egyptian Americans for Freedom and Justice (EAFJ). EAFJ leader Mahmoud El Sharkawy is a member of the Brotherhood’s international organization and serves as liaison between his group and Brotherhood members exiled in Turkey, Egypt’s Al-Bawaba newspaper reported in April.

Former State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki downplayed the visit and denied it was a Brotherhood delegation, saying it was a delegation of former Egyptian parliamentarians which included members of the Freedom and Justice Party. Delegation member Waleed Sharaby said in a February interview with Egypt’s Mekameleen TV that the State Department agreed with their position that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi had not brought stability and that his removal would pave the way for a transition to democracy.

Conclusion:

President Obama, Robert Malley, and State Department Assistant Secretary for Near East Policy, former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson, have led this country dangerously astray believing there are ‘good Islamists’ like the Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s proxies. By extension that would include the Islamic Republic of Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear hegemon. This has jeopardized relations with valued allies in the region, Israel, the Kurds in Iraq, Sunni members of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Egyptian Al Sisi government. Is this part of a radical plan by the President to insinuate Islamic theocratic doctrine upending Judeo Christian values at the core of our Constitution?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Iran/ North Korean Nuclear & ICBM Development Precludes a P5+1 Agreement

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Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow of the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies published a book review in Friday’s Wall Street Journal by former Pentagon official, Matthew Kroenig, A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat. Matthew Kroenig is an Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Kroenig, who served under former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, presents a thesis that the only way to stop the Islamic regime in Tehran from achieving nuclear hegemony is for the US, not Israel, to bomb several key facilities in Iran. The suggested targets are the centrifuge enrichment centers at Fordow and Natanz, the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, and the plutonium producing heavy water reactor at Arak.

timetoattackbookcoverWhy? Because as Gerecht relates, the sanctions regime has not deterred Iran from investing over $100 billion in the project to achieve nuclear hegemony replete with the means of delivery. Further, as he points out in his review, the US has the means to seriously cripple those facilities with 30,000 pound bunker busting deep penetrating bombs. The hoped for Stuxnet malworm and other cyber warfare is past. Gerecht notes in his review, they have only “gummed up” the whirling centrifuges enriching weapons grade uranium. Neither does he believe that targeted assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, allegedly by Mossad, has put a dent in Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear capability. Given that the current P5+1 discussions with Iran seeking to perfect a final agreement with a deadline of July 20th, Gerecht makes this prediction:

Next month in Vienna, Iran and the P5+1 world powers will extend the interim agreement they struck six months ago on Iran’s nuclear program. Secretary of State John Kerry will hold a press conference, offering both sides solemn praise for finding common ground. All the while, through this tough compromise and historic collaboration, the Islamic Republic’s 9,000 spinning centrifuges will keep on enriching uranium; the other 10,000 installed centrifuges won’t be dismantled. Eventually these centrifuges, or thousands of new-and-improved ones, will be able to produce bomb-grade fuel.

Kroenig cautions:

Why would anyone believe that we would fight a nuclear war with Iran if we didn’t even have the stomach for a conventional war with a nonnuclear Iran?

Gericht’s conclusion from his review of Kroenig’s, A Time to Attack:

Mr. Kroenig readily admits that there will be costs for preventive military action. Tehran will likely respond with terrorism, directly or through proxies. But Mr. Kroenig contends that those costs are much lower than allowing Iran to go nuclear. Whether or not he’s right, we will soon find out.

Watch this May 12, 2014  C-SPAN Book TV discussion with Prof. Kroenig about A Time to Attack.

Problem is that the Obama Administration failed to foster regime change in Iran in the fraudulent elections of June 2009. Israel and many others concerned over Iran’s rising hegemony in the Middle East believe that America doesn’t have the will and the unity to undertake what Kroenig suggests. Just look at the President latest tracking poll numbers; less than 37% of American thinks that he is pursuing foreign policies protecting our nation’s interests.

Claudia Rosett in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal  published an op ed, Iran Could Outsource Its Nuclear –Weapons Program to North Korea. Rosett commented:

The pieces have long been in place for nuclear collaboration between the two countries. North Korea and Iran are close allies, drawn together by decades of weapons deals and mutual hatred of America and its freedoms. Weapons-hungry Iran has oil; oil-hungry North Korea makes weapons. North Korea has been supplying increasingly sophisticated missiles and missile technology to Iran since the 1980s, when North Korea hosted visits by Hasan Rouhani (now Iran’s president) and Ali Khamenei (Iran’s supreme leader since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989).

In the March edition of the NER, we published a piece entitled, Has Iran Developed Nuclear Weapons in North Korea?  We wrote:

The UN nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA has no access to North Korean nuclear facilities. These developments corroborate the assessment of private intelligence and national security analyst Ilana Freedman. See The Freedman Report on January 31st, “A Friendlier Iran? Or Have They Just Moved Their Nukes to North Korea?“

Rosett in the WSJ op ed lays out the case for what the NER article demonstrated was a plausible means of evading sanctions. The evidence for that we noted was North Korean/ Iranian cooperation with Assad’s Syria creating a plutonium reactor on the Euphrates at Al Kibar destroyed by Israel’s Air Force in September 2007. We drew attention to Iranian/ North Korean joint development of large rocket boosters sufficient to loft nuclear MIRV warheads and the likelihood that Iran might have that capability within a few years. In June 2014, The Algemeiner reported an Iranian official announcing that it possessed a 5,000 kilometer (approximately 3,125 miles) range missile that could hit the strategic base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean:

“In the event of a mistake on the part of the United States, their bases in Bahrain and (Diego) Garcia will not be safe from Iranian missiles,” said an Iranian Revolutionary Guard adviser to Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Majatba Dhualnuri.

Kroenig wrote in his book:

Iran is building ICBMs No country on Earth, not even the United States, mounts conventional warheads on ICBMs. Traditionally, ICBMs have had one purpose: to deliver nuclear warheads thousands of miles away. If Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, then why does it have such a robust ICBM development program?

The clock is ticking on  P5+1 and Iran endeavoring to reach an agreement by July 20th. Five days of talks in Vienna ended yesterday. They will reconvene on July 2nd and may or may not conclude with an agreement on July 20th.  The Wall Street Journal in a report on those negotiations contrasted the views of US Negotiator, Deputy Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, with those of Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.  It noted that the talks ended without a joint statement. Sherman said: “We are at a very crucial moment in these negotiations. Our Conversations this week have been very tough but constructive.”  Zarif commented that only a deal could emerge if the US backed away from what he termed were “excessive demands.” “I advised them to think more seriously and to be realistic and to look for a solution.” Translated that means, we are poles apart. Meanwhile those centrifuges at Fordow and Natanz keep whirling enriching uranium while Iranian/ North Korean joint ICBM and MIRV development continue.  If we were bettors, we’d put even money on Gericht’s prediction: no agreement by July 20th or even six months hence.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review.