How they sold us the Iran deal 

SETH J. FRANTZMAN   5-23-16

Eight hundred eleven op-eds. Three hundred fifty- two letters to the editor. Two hundred twenty-seven editorials. That’s the number of “pro-diplomacy” articles that Ploughshares Fund takes credit for helping support as part of its “proactive” media campaign to support the Iran deal last year. They “were published during critical moments of the Iran campaign,” the website of the fund boasts in its 2015 annual report.

The revelations about the work that this one fund did to support the deal is just part of a larger story now being revealed in the US about how the government worked with NGOs to sell the Iran deal. NGO funding went to organizations such as National Public Radio and the “pro-peace” Israel lobby group J Street.

The Iran deal is done. But understanding just how the wool was pulled over our eyes is necessary so that future “deals” of this sort can be challenged at their source. When one looks back at how US public support was influenced, it should serve as both a lesson about how the government works through its non-profit allies and about how public opinion can be manipulated and consent manufactured. /6943/Home_Page/Article_Pages/in_read_TOP

The first lesson from how the Iran deal was sold to the public is that it is important to follow the money. Bradley Klapper at the Associated Press notes, “Outside groups of all stripes are increasingly giving money to news organizations for special projects or general news coverage... Ploughshares’ backing is more unusual given its prominent role in the rancorous, partisan debate over the Iran deal.”

The fund gave money to the Arms Control Association, Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council, J Street, the National Iranian American Council and Princeton University. In short, if you supported the Iran deal in 2015, it might have been a good deal financially. The funding from this one fund may be only the tip of the iceberg of the overall funding that went in to pushing this deal. Kate Gould of the Friends Committee, the lobbying arm of the Quakers (which supported the deal), is quoted as saying that the “Ploughshares campaign is the most high-impact coalition effort I’ve ever witnessed in Washington.”

Everyone should read through the rest of the 2015 Ploughshares annual report to get a glimpse of the network involved in pushing this Iran agenda. It symbolizes the larger phenomenon of how supposedly “non-governmental” civil society actually works to push government policy. It also illustrates how well-funded networks of powerful, influential players work in synergy in Washington policy circles and throughout the media to push agendas. /6943/Home_Page/Article_Pages/in_read_middle 

Citizens of a democracy are in some ways at the mercy of these powerful networks, and when the government and non-governmental groups and media all work in concert to push something like the Iran deal, the average citizen has very little say in the matter. Citizens of a dictatorship, such as Iran, have even less.

Whereas in a democracy there may be pushback and open debate, in Iran there is none. That means there are no non-governmental groups fighting for minority rights, or encouraging peace, or fighting against the daily intolerance, chauvinist nationalism and religious extremism. Women in Iran are harassed by the government for how they dress on Instagram, minorities such as the Baluchis or Zoroastrians and Baha’i face brutal discrimination.

Yet Americans swallowed an agenda that pushed a sugar-coated view of Iran last year.

In the US those opposing the deal were painted as “warmongers.” Chuck Schumer was depicted in a cartoon, titled “shame on Schumer,” as a woodchuck “rejecting the peace deal.” As the “woodchuck” character he is shown with an Israeli flag behind him, with a commentator saying “traitor says what.” The thinly veiled attempt to paint him as a dual-loyalty “traitor” for opposing the deal was only part of the “Iran deal or war” narrative pushed last year.

Americans were told by the Obama administration that “without a deal there will be war.” Lawrence Wilkerson wrote at US News and World Report that “if the US rejects the Iran deal it would be alone in bombing or invading.”

Why was war presented as the overall alternative? How was the strongest nation in the world convinced that if it didn’t do a deal with Iran, it would be “forced” to go to war? By 2015 the US and Iran were already warming relations in their similar views of the threat of Islamist State to the region. There was no talk of war, until the pro-deal agenda told people that no deal would mean war. The real warmongers were those pushing the deal in a carefully constructed narrative, surely focus-grouped, to scare Americans.

It’s a bit like a Mafia protection racket. The very people scaring the American people about war were the ones trying to sell them a “peace” deal, when in fact Iran posed little danger of war and the US administration had never considered war as an alternative.

J Street’s ad in The New York Times said the deal “makes the US and Israel safer.” The decision by J Street to join the pro-deal agenda in retrospect seems carefully orchestrated by the administration.

Obama was quoted by the BBC as saying that “every country in the world, except Israel” supported the deal. Since Israel and pro-Israel groups were against the deal, what better way to neuter them then to use another “pro-Israel” group against them? And it worked phenomenally: the pro-Israel lobby’s antideal efforts were a miserable defeat.

It’s easy to be pro-diplomacy. But who benefits in this case? Iran potentially got billions of dollars, renewed trade and legitimacy and an ability to continue to fund its proxy wars. Remember how the decision to “inspect” Syria’s chemical weapons was lauded as a “landmark diplomatic victory”? A victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad, even though the US took credit for it? On May 17 it was alleged that Syria had once again used sarin gas “for the first time since 2013.” 

But wasn’t the deal supposed to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons? The “victory of diplomacy” narrative always means victory for a regime. When it comes to things like chemical or nuclear weapons or suppression of human rights, diplomacy aids the aggressor. If your neighbor builds a fence on your lawn, the longer you use “diplomacy,” the longer the fence remains.

Iran built a nuclear program, then scared everyone into negotiating with it lest it “go nuclear,” and obtained everything it wanted through this weird “war” blackmail, even as it continued to increase its power. Assad’s only lesson from 2013 is that he can do what he wants and get away with it.

If you still think that the Iran deal was some great diplomatic breakthrough, avoiding war, just read what the Iranians themselves were recorded as saying in secret US diplomatic cables revealed via Wikileaks.

A 2006 cable from the UAE noted that the conservative leaders in Tehran manufactured a nuclear “crisis” to gain political points, and another told US agents that Iran didn’t have the “necessary skill” to build a bomb. Another report to the CIA in 2009 noted, “[Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad has decided for a variety of reasons to reduce tensions with the West and to seek some type of nuclear accommodation.”

So, wait – Iran didn’t want war, it wanted accommodation. And the US worked to accommodate it.

Perhaps in the future the public and media will ask tougher questions, rather than allow themselves to be so easily manipulated and their consent so easily manufactured.

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SINCE THE JERUSALEM POST HAS HIRED A NEW EDITOR, THE JERUSALEM  POST HAS TURNED LEFT AND HAS COME OUT AGAINST PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU TIME AND TIME AGAIN.

By Ted Belman

On May 13, 2016, I announced that JPOST is about to make a big mistake in that it was about to discontinue Martin Sherman’s excellent column, INTO THE FRAY.

I called upon my readers to protest vigorously should the column be cancelled and to, in turn, cancel their subscriptions to the paper.

Many did in fact send emails in support of Sherman’s columns. 

Management replied that,

“Contrary to the false rumors, The Jerusalem Post has not decided to discontinue Martin's column and looks forward to continuing to publish it on a weekly basis. 

“Martin has requested a week off for a break but I look forward to publishing his column again in a week's time.” 

I spoke to Marin Sherman about this and he advised that the problem was still unresolved. Apparently, his emolument of 250 shekels an article was to be discontinued. Martin was expected to write without compensation. To my mind, it was insult enough that in the past, he was paid such a pittance. After all Sherman spends more than a day to write each article.

So last Friday, JPOST replaced his column by one by Ben Caspit who Arutz Sheva described as “one of Israel's best-known leftist journalists, also known for his hatred of Netanyahu”.{MIL-ED COMMENT: CASPIT IS EVALUATED AS A VERY UNRELIABLE COMMENTATOR.}

I am told that Caspit writes in Hebrew and which necessitates the services of a paid translator. His article generated almost zero reader response all of which was negative. Sherman’s columns on the other hand generate a huge response most of which is positive,

So why is JPOST unwilling to pay Sherman for his work. Is it really to save 250 shekels per week? Or is it more to do with Sherman’s ideology and support of compensated emigration for Arabs.

I have noticed that since JPOST has hired a new editor, JPOST has turned left and has come out against Prime Minister Netanyahu time and time again.

Please let JPOST know how you feel about this turn of events

 Contact:

CEO  – Ronit Hasin-Hochman <ronith@jpost.com>

Editor Yaakov Katz <yaakov@jpost.com> 

Ted Belman

Jerusalem, Israel

Those Poor, Confused Palestinians

Published: May 15th, 2016

Stephen M. Flatow

Those poor, confused Palestinians!

A new poll shows that most Palestinian Arabs say the Palestinian Authority (which rules over them) is to blame for their troubles, and not Israel (which stopped occupying them more than twenty years ago).

For some reason, the Palestinians refuse to toe the party line that New York Times reporters and American Jewish radicals keep feeding them.

Those reporters and radicals seem to have swallowed the myth that the Palestinians are still “occupied” by Israel, and that the Israeli “occupation” is the source of all their problems.

But those poor, confused Palestinians look around and don’t see any Israeli soldiers and therefore refuse to go along with everyone else and pretend the Israelis are still there.

The new poll was conducted by the Palestinian organization AWRAD among 1,200 Palestinian Arabs in late April. It has a margin of error of three percent.

Residents of Judea/Samaria were asked: “How do you view the overall situation in the West Bank since the appointment of the Hamdallah government in 2013?” That’s Rami Hamdallah, who became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority under chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Some 44 percent responded that things have “worsened.” So they were asked a follow-up question: “If worsened, who do you believe is responsible?”

The possible answers were “Israel,” “the Palestinian Authority,” “Hamas,” “International donors,” or “Don’t know.”

Now, if these Palestinians had been paying close attention to what their American supporters were telling them, they would have known that the “correct” answer is Israel.

Diaa Haddid, the Times’s new correspondent in Jerusalem, and Thomas Friedman, its longtime foreign affairs columnist, are constantly claiming that Israel is “occupying the Palestinians” and that Israel is responsible for whatever goes wrong in the territories.

J Street and the S. Daniel Abraham Center push the same line. And just last week, a group of American novelists, led by Michael Chabon, an outspoken Jewish critic of Israel, toured parts of Judea/Samaria in preparation for their forthcoming book on the “50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation” – you know, the occupation that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ended in 1995.

These American advocates of Palestinian statehood don’t seem to know that the Israelis withdrew in 1995 from the cities where 98 percent of the Palestinians live. But the Palestinians know it because they actually live there, and they know the Israelis are gone. They know there are no Israelis left in Ramallah. Or Bethlehem. Or Nablus (Shechem). The list goes on and on.

And because the Palestinians know they are occupied by the Palestinian Authority, most of them find it impossible to rail (to the pollster) against Israel’s nonexistent occupation.

Only 28 percent of the poll’s respondents answered that Israel is mostly to blame for their troubles. Fully 59 percent said the PA is to blame. (Five percent blamed the donors; 7 percent had no opinion.)

Oops!

Those politically incorrect poll results were particularly inconvenient for the Chabon-led gang of traveling novelists. Just last week, Chabon, a self-appointed “expert” on the situation after returning from a few days in the territories, was telling anyone who would listen about that awful Israeli “occupation” which he imagines he saw.

“The occupation [is] the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life,” he announced.

AWRAD, the aforementioned pollsters responsible for the survey, should be receiving an angry letter from Chabon’s publicist any day now. After all, if AWRAD keeps asking Palestinians simple, logical questions, there is a real danger the respondents might continue telling the truth about the Palestinian Authority occupation regime. And if they do that, sales of Chabon’s “Israeli occupation” book are likely to be meager indeed.

Michael Chabon might even be compelled to return to writing fiction – although some might say he never stopped.

Stephen M. Flatow

About the Author: Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.

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JPOST is about to make a big mistake

By Ted Belman

There are worrying rumors of managerial dementia at the Jerusalem Post according to which the paper is about to discontinue the outstanding column, INTO THE FRAY by Dr. Martin Sherman. 

In my opinion his column was one of the most widely read and respected on the pages of the JPost or any where for that matter.  To discontinue it would show a blatant lack of respect for its readership and utter disdain for readers’ preferences.

Sherman has a large following and many of his avid readers, I would imagine, buy the JPost largely because of his column. I would not be surprised if many of them stop buying the paper in protest. 

His column provided penetrating insights into current events and creative policy prescriptions which generated lively and constructive debate in a large segment of the Anglo-Saxon Jewish community, both in Israel and the Diaspora, and with many non-Jewish readers with an interest in the developments. Martin Sherman is in a class by himself when it comes to his understanding of the problem Israel is faced with and his prescription for solving it.

There is little doubt that cutting of Sherman’s column will be a tremendous blow, not only to JPost, but also to pro-Israel advocates who put great stock in what he has to say. The editors and management should brace themselves for a considerable wave of protest anger and resentment from readers.

I call upon my readers to protest vigorously should the column be cancelled and to in turn cancel your subscriptions to the paper. 

In the meantime should anyone wish to make their dissatisfaction known these are the relevant contact details at the JPost  or message their Facebook pages.

Thoughts  from Iran Deal Lies Have Consequences by Jonathan Tobin.

Fact The White House lied to the American people when it was selling the Iran nuclear deal to the media, Congress and the public matter? 

Source:  Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes in his interview with David Samuels as published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May 8, 2016.

Consequence:  The  nuclear  deal  guarantees that the Islamist regime will eventually get their nuclear weapon. That puts Tehran in a position to make good on its quest for regional hegemony. And   the West  won’t be able to do much about it. 

The lie at the heart of Rhodes’ sales job for the negotiations and then the deal was that the Iranian presidential election in 2013 put in place a set of new leaders that were amenable to cutting a deal with the West that would, in President Obama’s phrase, allow Iran to “get right with the world.” But as even some administration figures have admitted in the last several months after deal began to be implemented, there are no “moderates” in Tehran. The disputes within the regime are between different sets of hard-liners whose differences have nothing to do with their support for the acquisition of a nuclear weapon or an aggressive foreign policy

 The support of the liberal mainstream media  helped  keep wavering Democrats in line behind the president. It was that factor that, cenabled the deal to squeak through Congress via a Senate filibuster.

The lie is of lasting importance because, if there are no real Iranian moderates and no sign whatsoever that the regime wants to change, then what Rhodes sold to the press was a fatal mistake that strengthens and empowers a dangerous regime. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz noted ,

As a result of sunset clauses in the deal that see most of the key restrictions disappearing over an eight to 15 year period, Iran will be left with an industrial-size nuclear program with near-zero nuclear breakout, easier advance centrifuge-powered clandestine sneak out, an ICBM program and a more powerful economy increasingly immunized against sanctions. If the Iranian regime has not moderated by then, the United States will be facing a much more formidable and dangerous enemy and may have little choice but to use military force (as sanctions power will be severely degraded) to stop Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. At that point, Iran will be stronger and the consequences of military action more devastating. In selling the Iran deal on a lie, Rhodes may have made war with Iran more not less likely.

 The bottom line here is that a nuclear Iran will have  the financial might to stand up to any belated Western attempt to undo Obama’s mistake. Obama and his “mind-meld partner” Rhodes endangered the security of the United States, Israel, and the West. That it was done on the strength of a falsehood and with the help of credulous, feckless Washington press corps is less important than the catastrophic nature of the mistake they have made.

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Rhodes to Perdition

An exposé on journalism in the Obama era

By JAMES TARANTO WSJ   May 6, 2016 

David Samuels’s lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, is meant to be a puff piece. In some ways it is: Rhodes comes across in the New York Times magazine story as very effective and powerful, but also as morally dubious. Even more dubious, in Samuels’s presentation, is the state of American journalism in the Obama era.

Consider this passage:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plot lines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies.

To put it less flatteringly, Rhodes is a masterful propagandist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—an administration, like any large organization, needs people to speak to the public on its behalf, and to engage in such advocacy is not, in itself, dishonorable.

But lying to the public is. Samuels describes what he calls the “innovative campaign to sell” Obama’s Iran nuclear deal:

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented . . . was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. . . .

In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015. . . . While the president’s statement was technically accurate . . . it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This is the section of Samuels’s profile that has received the most attention, and understandably so. “Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers,” writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.” Make that the Obama White House and the New York Times!

The campaign for the Iran nuclear deal will likely draw comparisons with the Bush administration’s effort to promote military action in Iraq. There are similarities, but also key differences. Before joining the Obama campaign in 2007, Rhodes had worked as “chief note-taker” for the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, where, Samuels writes, he “developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour.”

The Iraq effort was promoted using false information, but even Rhodes does not claim the deception was deliberate. As Samuels writes: “For Rhodes . . . the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.” The Obama administration decision-makers aren’t morons, just con artists.

Not that the public fell for the con. Most polls found the public skeptical of the deal, and the administration succeeded in attracting only the bare minimum of support (all from Democrats) necessary to avoid rejection by Congress. In those respects it is similar to ObamaCare, passed with only Democratic votes and over strong public opposition—and sold, as we now know, through a campaign of deliberate deception that implicated the president himself.

Another similarity with ObamaCare is that the administration can count on its allies in the press to relay its propaganda uncritically. The Samuels piece describes this in especially stark terms:

Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—”

“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

The fault here lies not with the ventriloquist but with journalists who decide to be dummies.

Samuels observes that we no longer live “in a world where . . . carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power.” That last qualification is telling: It suggests that the Washington press corps is partisan as well as (selectively) servile, and leaves open the possibility that the journalists would reclaim some of their adversary spirit in the event of a Trump administration.

That seems likely to us, though the effect might be surprisingly similar. Candidate Trump has proved rather effective at using the press’s hostility to advance his “narrative” and “messaging.”