ARTICLES

WHY I’M BECOMING A JEW AND WHY YOU SHOULD, TOO

Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too
By Nick Cohen
We will learn the essential lesson that antisemitism is not about Jews, but power
The Observer
March 20, 2016

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/19/why-i-am-becoming-a-jew-and-you-should-too

It took me 40 years to become a Jew. When I was a child, I wasn’t a Jew and not only because I never went to a synagogue. My father’s family had abandoned their religion so he wasn’t Jewish. More to the point, my mother and my grandmother weren’t Jewish either, so according to orthodox Judaism’s principles of matrilineal descent, it was impossible for me to be a Jew.

All I had was the “Cohen” name. I once asked my parents why they had not changed it. After saying, quite rightly, that you should never seek to appease racists, they confessed to thinking that antisemitism was over by the 1960s. After Hitler, humanity would surely see where the world’s most insane hatred led and resolve to put it to one side.

Bertolt Brecht said: “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

My parents did not believe Brecht, at least not in the 1960s. Nor did I for a while. I was and remain an atheist who knows that communalist and identity politics crush individuality. I had no wish to join a tribe, let alone a religious one.

Still there was no escaping the “Cohen”. When I first responded to the antisemitism that has spread so far from the extreme left into the mainstream that it now threatens to poison the Labour party, I am ashamed to say I considered two disgraceful replies.

I might, I thought, not stop at opposing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and pledging support to leftwing Israelis and Palestinians who wanted a just and peaceful settlement for both peoples, but go on to behave like a grotesque from a Howard Jacobson satire. I would reassure fanatics that their “anti-Zionism” (that is, their call for the total destruction of the world’s only Jewish state) was not remotely racist.

Fortunately for my self-respect, I never sank that low. Whenever I hear Jews announce their hatred of Israel’s very existence, I suspect that underneath their loud bombast lies a quiet plea to the Islamists and neo-Nazis who might harm them: “I’m not like the others. Don’t pick on me.”

Unfortunately, I assured anyone who asked (and some who did not) that, despite appearances to the contrary, I wasn’t Jewish. And that was as dishonourable. I sounded like a black man trying to pass as white or a German arguing with the Gestapo that there was a mistake in the paperwork.

I stopped and accepted that racism changes your perception of the world and yourself. You become what your enemies say you are. And unless I wanted to shame myself, I had to become a Jew. A rather odd Jew, no doubt: a militant atheist who had to phone a friend to ask what on earth “mazel tov” meant. But a Jew nonetheless.

As one of the finest liberal ambitions is to find the sympathy to imagine the lives of others, you should become a Jew too. Declare that you have converted to Judaism or rediscovered your Jewish “heritage” and see the reaction. It’s not just that, if you are middle class and fortunate, you might experience racism for the first time, which in itself would be a “learning experience” worth having. You might also learn the essential lesson that antisemitism is not about Jews. Like rape, it’s about power.

Whether the antisemitic conspiracy theory is deployed by German Nazis or Arab dictators, French anti-Dreyfusards or Saudi clerics, the argument is always the same. Democracy, an independent judiciary, equal human rights, freedom of speech and publication – all these “supposed” freedoms – are nothing but swindles that hide the machinations of the secret Jewish rulers of the world.

Describe the fantasy the Tsarist and Nazi empires developed that bluntly and it is impossible to understand how the Labour party is in danger of becoming as tainted as Ukip by the racists it attracts.

But consider how many leftwing activists, institutions or academics would agree with a politer version.

Western governments are the main source of the ills of the world. The “Israel lobby” controls western foreign policy. Israel itself is the “root cause” of all the terrors of the Middle East, from the Iraq war to Islamic State. Polite racism turns the Jews, once again, into demons with the supernatural power to manipulate and destroy nations. Or as the Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallström, who sees herself as a feminist rather than a racial conspiracist, explained recently, Islamist attacks in Paris were the fault of Israeli occupiers in the West Bank.

Or consider the otherwise bizarre indulgence of ultra-right religious extremists by people who otherwise describe themselves as liberals and leftists. The belief that Jews fuel radical Islam allows them to overlook superstition and the tyrannical denial of equal rights. They’re against Israel and that’s all that matters.

I could describe at vitriolic length how disgusted leftwing Jewish friends are that Labour members chose Jeremy Corbyn, despite his support for an Anglican cleric who linked to extremist sites that blamed Jews for 9/11, and his defence of an Islamist who recycled the libel that Jews dined on the blood of Christian children from the bottom of a medieval dung heap.

But even if a chastened Labour expels this or that antisemite or disciplines the Jew-baiters at the Oxford University Labour club, I do not see how its leaders can challenge the conspiratorial world-view they shared for decades. They would be renouncing everything they once believed in.

As someone who warned in the 00s about the growing darkness on the left, I am pessimistic about the chances of change. If you keep shouting “fire” and the fire brigade never comes, you tend to assume the house will burn to the ground. But perhaps familiarity breeds contempt and I am not the best judge.

If Labour MPs and members want the party to break with a past that has led to leftists allying with religious reactionaries who deny universal human rights and hate every value the centre-left professes to hold, they will have to learn to treat all racisms equally.

They will need to make a brief acquaintance with European history and understand that the left has no guaranteed immunity from fascistic ideology. They will have to see antisemitism for what it is and understand why it always leads to despotism and despair. Like me, in short, and if only briefly, they will have to become Jews themselves.

LABOUR AND THE LEFT HAVE AN ANTISEMITISM PROBLEM

Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem
Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters
By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
Saturday 19 March 2016

As the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is hatred of Jews.

I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.

Start with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God” and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.

It’d be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.

But this is the brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel. Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.

You can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit targets were Jews.

What of those who attack not Jews, but only Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.

But Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then use those terms: they carry much less baggage.

To state the obvious, criticism of Israel and Zionism is not necessarily anti-Jewish: that’s why there are so many Jewish critics of Israel, inside and outside the country. But it doesn’t take a professor of logic to know that just because x is not always y, it does not follow that x can never be y. Of course opposition to Israel is not always antisemitic. But that does not mean that it is never and can never be antisemitic. As Downing and Kirby have helpfully illustrated.

I hope that, as a result, many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism. I hope they’ll remember that, while most anti-Israel activists are acting in good faith, some are motivated more darkly, while others carelessly express their opposition to Israel in language or imagery that has a melancholy history.

There’s a deeper reason to pause. Many good people on the left want to make things neat and simple by saying that Israel and Zionism have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. That they can deplore the former even while they protect and show solidarity with the latter. But it’s not quite as easy as that.

While many Jews – especially in conversations with each other – condemn Israeli government policy going back many years, they do identify strongly with Israel and its people. A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity. Through ties of family or history, they are bound up with it. When Jews pray they face east – towards Jerusalem. And they have done that for 2,000 years.

It’s inconvenient, I know, but that needs to be remembered by those who insist that there’s no connection between Israel and Jews, that it’s perfectly possible to loathe everything about Israel – the world’s only Jewish country – without showing any hostility to Jews.

Jews themselves usually don’t see it, or experience it, that way. That doesn’t mean no one should ever criticise Israel, for fear of treading on Jewish sensitivities. Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that many Jews worry when they see a part of the left whose hatred of Israel is so intense, unmatched by the animus directed at any other state.

They wonder why the same degree of passion – the same willingness to take to the streets, to tweet night and day – is not stirred by, say, Russia, whose bombing of Syria killed at least 1,700 civilians; or the Assad regime itself, which has taken hundreds of thousands of Arab lives. They ask themselves, what exactly is it about the world’s only Jewish country that convinces its loudest opponents it represents a malignancy greater than any other on the planet?

Which brings us to Jeremy Corbyn. No one accuses him of being an antisemite. But many Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)

Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny.

The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.

ARTICLE

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE

The Obama Doctrine
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
April 2016 Issue

At 19,000 words, the piece is too long to attach in this dispatch, but you can read it here if you have time.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF BARACK OBAMA

Here is David Frum’s (much shorter) response to Goldberg’s essay, also published in The Atlantic.

The Disappointment of Barack Obama
He admits one major mistake: not making sufficient allowances for how unreasonable other people are.
By David Frum
The Atlantic
March 10, 2016

About a quarter way into Jeffrey Goldberg’s intimate profile of President Obama, Goldberg mentions German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects.”

Thirty-five years ago, The Atlantic ran one of the most famous interviews in the history of journalism: Bill Greider’s “The Education of David Stockman.” Goldberg’s interviews deserve to become equally famous, perhaps under the heading: “The Disappointment of Barack Obama.” For the dominant theme of these interviews is that we, all of us, have grievously let down the president.

Obama, concludes Goldberg, “has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is.” The good news is that these inadequate partners and purblind adversaries will soon suffer their comeuppance: “What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.”

The trouble is that this historical consummation seems to be rather slow in arriving. Across Europe and the Middle East, old friends and new worry that under President Obama the United States has lost its bearings and its will. “I think I believe in American power more than Obama does,” Goldberg quotes the King of Jordan as saying—and he is not alone. Obama is obviously aware of the growing level of concern that he has set the United States adrift. The president insists that the United States, not its geopolitical rivals, continues to set the agenda for G20 meetings. When it comes to clerical tasks, the U.S.A. apparently remains No. 1. And to those impatient with the gaps in his leadership, Obama replies with scorn: They’re mad at him? No! He’s the one who’s mad at them!

In Goldberg’s telling: “By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex” that many in the White House see as “doing the bidding of ... Arab and pro-Israel funders.” Obama has had “not much patience for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his understanding of the region.”

And when his understanding proved wrong, that only confirmed Obama’s disdain for everybody else. Early on, Obama had pulsed with excitement over the so-called Arab Spring. But there too, as Goldberg observes, the president “grew disillusioned” as “brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East”—a development that apparently caught the president entirely by surprise. Now, Obama wistfully says, “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.” “Smart” here is shorthand for “conforming to Obama’s wishes.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has certainly ruled autocratically. Yet Obama is vexed, reports Goldberg, that Erdogan “refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria.”

Obama seems to feel gathering disdain too for both sides of the Arab-Israeli dispute. On the one hand, Obama appears annoyed that Muslims worldwide did not heed his advice “to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.” On the other hand, “According to [former Defense Secretary] Leon Panetta, [Obama] has questioned why the U.S. should maintain Israel’s so-called qualitative military edge.”

This may all seem a roundabout way of arguing, “It’s not my fault!” Goldberg records only one major self-criticism by the president: Obama admits he does not make sufficient allowances for how unreasonable other people are. In the president’s words: “Every president has strengths and weaknesses. And there is no doubt that there are times when I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”

Thus, for example, now that the war in Libya has left chaos in its wake, Obama blames himself for not anticipating other people’s shortcomings. “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.” British Prime Minister David Cameron stopped paying attention to Libya, Obama said, instead becoming “distracted by a range of other things.” Then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy behaved even worse. “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure [for the war].”

The Libyans likewise disappointed Obama. “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected.” So, having overthrown Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi, and plunged into civil war a country only a short boat ride away from southern Italy, the president sorrowfully disengaged. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa.”

Yet the Middle East and North Africa were not so easily kept at bay. In 2013, 2014, and 2015, a vast surge of migrants and asylum-seekers sought entry into Europe from across the Mediterranean—and tried, in smaller numbers, to reach the United States too. When voters reacted negatively to Obama’s plan to resettle Syrians in the United States, the president was stunned.

The president seemed similarly stunned by the anxiety that last November’s Paris attacks provoked in the United States. “Everyone back home had lost their minds,” an official tells Goldberg. “Later,” in Goldberg’s words, “the president would say that he had failed to fully appreciate the fear many Americans were experiencing.” Even after he appreciated it, he apparently still could not respect it. The “sort of panic,” in Goldberg’s words, that Obama “worries about most is the type that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American openness.” Such xenophobia Obama regards as a much greater danger to the United States than terrorism.

Politics is a realm of paradox. The Obama foreign policy is especially rich in them. A president who professes multilateralism has left the country’s alliances in disarray. A president who justly criticized his predecessor for poor postwar planning in Iraq launched his own war in Libya with no postwar plan at all. A president who rejects religious extremism and authoritarianism has built his Middle East policy on visions of cooperation with extremist and authoritarian Iran. A president who sought to teach America the wisdom of humility never learned that lesson himself.

Of all the paradoxes, maybe the most important will be this: A president who came to office so deeply uneasy about American leadership has—over almost eight years of not providing it—reminded the rest of the world why that leadership is so badly needed.

* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.

CONTENTS

1. “Religion of peace”: 2000 lashes for saying you don’t believe in Allah
2. 39 Yemeni universities bombed, yet no “Saudi Apartheid Week”
3. UN elects Syrian government to lead key human rights committee
4. “France awards Legion d’Honneur to Saudi prince” (Guardian, March 7, 2016)
5. “Saudi Arabia sentences a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism on Twitter” (AP / Independent, Feb. 27, 2016)
6. “Saudi Arabia’s unholy war” (By Nasser Arrabyee, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, March 3, 2016)

“RELIGION OF PEACE”: 2000 LASHES FOR SAYING YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN ALLAH

[Notes by Tom Gross]

This is a follow-up to my recent dispatch “Raif Badawi’s wife pleads with the world not to forget her husband” in which I interviewed the wife of Saudi Arabia’s most famous political prisoner, the freedom of speech advocate Raif Badawi. (Video of my interview here.)

Since then, as I noted on the day of sentencing on my public Facebook page here, the Western-backed Saudi regime sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and (a life-threatening) 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism in twitter messages.

And now Frances’s left-wing socialist party president Francois Hollande has awarded France’s highest honor, the Legion d’Honneur, to visiting Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef.

That’s how Hollande (and the French foreign service which advises him) thanks the King for all his efforts for “peace and democracy”. The French hypocrisy matches that of the British Foreign Office which advised the British government to elect Saudi Arabia to a key position on the UN Human Right Council recently.

Saudi Arabia yesterday carried out its 70th execution so far this year. Most people sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia are beheaded with a sword. Reports indicate that the Saudis have now beheaded at least as many, if not more, people so far this year than the Islamic State (which on Friday executed a teenager in northern Aleppo province for missing Friday prayers – picture below from an Islamist website).

* See also: Western politicians and journalists’ strange claim that Islam has always been a “religion of peace”

39 YEMENI UNIVERSITIES BOMBED, YET NO “SAUDI APARTHEID WEEK”

I attach two articles below, from the British papers The Guardian and Independent. Following that I attach a piece from the website of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace by the Yemeni journalist Nasser Arrabyee about the brutal Saudi war on Yemen. As I have pointed out several times over the past year in these dispatches, the war is being largely ignored by the western media, which is why I try and run pieces on it in these dispatches.

The Saudis and their gulf allies, using western weapons, have bombed airports, electric power stations, bridges, roads, markets, factories, stadiums, and hospitals.

39 universities have been bombed, and 810 primary and secondary schools damaged, according to the UN, and yet there is no “Saudi Apartheid Week” at American, Canadian and British universities.

About 85 percent of Yemen’s population of 27 million is in desperate need of food, water, and medicine. Over 2.5 million Yemenis have been turned into refugees, and more than 23,000 civilians (including thousands of women and children) have been killed or injured.

Yet there is near silence from all those “award-wining” Middle East “experts” and commentators working for the BBC and writing for “leading” newspapers such as The Financial Times and The New York Times.

UN ELECTS SYRIAN GOVERNMENT TO LEAD KEY HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE

Click here to see a video of the UN last week electing Syria to the leadership of its Decolonization Committee, and then the other UN ambassadors giving a big round of applause to this representative of the Assad regime, a regime which has been carrying out crimes of a genocidal nature and (according to Israeli military intelligence) is continuing to use chemical weapons in attacks carried out even since the “ceasefire” went into place a week ago.

-- Tom Gross

* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.

CONTENTS

1. “What if the Iranian government was in charge of U.S. elections?” (Political satire by Ebrahim Nabavi)
2. “Iranians can vote for whoever the Ayatollahs say they can vote for” (Editorial, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28, 2016)
3. “Iran’s elections are magic” (By Eli Lake, Bloomberg views, Feb. 29, 2016)
4. “No new dawn in Iran” (By Ruthie Blum, Israel Hayom, March 1, 2016)
5. “The victims of wishful thinking about Iran” (By Saeid Golkar, The National Interest, Feb. 21, 2016)

ARTICLES

WHAT IF THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT WAS IN CHARGE OF U.S. ELECTIONS?

What if the Iranian Government Was in Charge of U.S. Elections?
Political satire by Ebrahim Nabavi

www.iranhumanrights.org/2016/02/nabavi-10-guardian-council/

Elections will be held in Iran in a few days and in the U.S. in a few months. Here’s what the Guardian Council, the clerical body charged with vetting all candidates in the Islamic Republic, would do if it was in charge of the American elections:

1. Declare Bernie Sanders a heretic and roundup and arrest his followers.

2. Disqualify Hillary Clinton because of her husband’s illegitimate relations with Monica Lewinsky.

3. Disqualify Donald Trump because he’s rich and obviously corrupt. Then reinstate him as a revolutionary because of all the nonsense he says. Then demand his resignation and prosecution for financial crimes.

4. Shut down The New York Times and ban political ads from appearing on any TV channel, except Fox News, until the end of the elections.

5. Block access to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram until after the elections and send Mark Zuckerberg to prison for acting against national security.

6. Ban Barack Obama’s image from appearing in the press and prohibit the media from broadcasting anything about his family.

7. Appoint the U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy as election monitors.

8. Disqualify Jeb Bush because he’s not going to get enough votes, or ask him to step down and keep quiet until after the elections, or send him to prison for becoming a candidate.

9. Disqualify all candidates from the Democratic Party.

10. Approve the nominations of Mark Rubio and Ted Cruz. Then order the police to prevent any gatherings in support of Cruz and ban all his campaign posters. Then declare Rubio the winner with 63 percent of the vote.

MODERATION, TEHRAN STYLE

Moderation, Tehran Style
Iranians can vote for whoever the Ayatollahs say they can vote for
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 28, 2016

One of the Obama Administration’s hopes for its nuclear deal with Iran was that it would empower regime moderates. So it’s no surprise that the deal’s cheerleaders are proclaiming Friday’s election results as a triumph for the Islamic Republic’s “moderate” and “reformist” factions. That depends on the meaning of the word “moderate.”

At stake Friday were seats in the Majlis, or Parliament, and the Assembly of Experts, the body that will select Iran’s next Supreme Leader. Like all Iranian elections, the vote was a carefully stage-managed process. Iranians picked from among candidates prescreened for ideological orthodoxy by the unelected Guardian Council and various security agencies.

The Guardians disqualified 6,000, or nearly half, of the original candidates to the Majlis. Of the 801 candidates to the Assembly of Experts, only a quarter, or 161, made it to the ballot. Most of the disqualified candidates belonged to the reformist and moderate factions of the regime. Imagine U.S. midterm elections in which the White House was able to ban all Tea Party or even nonprogressive Democratic candidates from the ballot.

Western media are nonetheless describing the results as an “embarrassing defeat” for the regime’s hard-liners and the moderates’ “best nationwide electoral showing in more than a decade,” as the Associated Press put it. Of particular note are the results in the capital, Tehran, a national barometer where on Sunday it appeared that candidates on the moderate list had swept all 30 seats in the Majlis.

Some moderates. Consider Mostafa Kavakebian. The General Secretary of Iran’s Democratic Party, Mr. Kavakebian is projected to enter the Majlis as a member for Tehran. In a 2008 speech he said: “The people who currently reside in Israel aren’t humans, and this region is comprised of a group of soldiers and occupiers who openly wage war on the people.”

Another moderate is Kazem Jalali, who previously served as the spokesman for the National Security and Foreign Affairs Committee of the Majlis and is projected to have won a seat. In 2011 Mr. Jalali said his committee “demands the harshest punishment” – meaning the death penalty – for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the two leaders of the pro-democracy Green Movement that was bloodily suppressed after stolen elections in 2009. Those two leaders are still under house arrest.

As for new Assembly of Experts, many of the “moderates” projected to have won seats were also listed on the hard-liners’ lists, since the ratio of candidates to seats was well below two. The winners include Mohammad Reyshahry, a former Intelligence Minister believed to have helped spearhead the 1988 summary execution of thousands of leftists; Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, another former Intelligence Minister believed to have directed the “chain murders” of the late 1990s; and Ayatollah Yousef Tabatabainejad, a fierce opponent of women’s rights who has called Israel “a cancerous tumor.”

The political reality in Iran is that the Ayatollahs, backed by the Revolutionary Guards, remain firmly in control.

Discover something new.

IRAN’S ELECTIONS ARE MAGIC

Iran’s Elections Are Magic
By Eli Lake
Bloomberg views
February 29, 2016

If you are following the Iranian elections, prepare to be dazzled. According to major news outlets from the BBC to the Associated Press, the reformists beat the hardliners.

But wait. Didn’t Iran’s Guardian Council disqualify most of the reformists back in January? Of course it did, but thanks to the magic of Iranian politics, many of yesterday’s hardliners are today’s reformist.

Take Kazem Jalali. Until this month, Jalali was one of those hardliners whom President Barack Obama had hoped to marginalize with the Iran nuclear deal. Jalali has, for example, called for sentencing to death the two leaders of the Green Movement, who are currently under house arrest. And yet, he ran on the list endorsed by the reformists in Friday’s election.

Two former intelligence ministers, accused by Iran’s democratic opposition of having dissidents murdered, Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri and Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, also ran on the list endorsed by Iran’s moderate president for the Assembly of Experts, the panel that is charged with selecting the next supreme leader.

The initial Iranian reform movement of the late 1990s sought to allow more social freedoms and political opposition of the unelected side of Iran’s government, such as the office of the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. Over time however, the changes supported by the reformists like Mohammed Khatami, who was president between 1997 and 2005, were stymied by these unelected institutions. When the next generation of reform politicians ran for office in 2009 under the banner of the green movement, the unelected part of the state arrested their supporters when they demonstrated what they saw as a stolen election. On Friday, many of the hardliners that opposed the reformists in the late 1990s and in 2009 are running under this banner.

As Saeed Ghasseminejad, an expert on Iranian politics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, recently said: “Putting a reformist or moderate label on hardliners does not make them reformist or moderate.”

In some cases, the transformation happened so quickly that the candidates themselves were surprised. Caitlin Shayda Pendleton, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, wrote last week, two of the candidates on Rouhani’s list for the Assembly of Experts told reporters they weren’t asked to be included among the alleged reformists. These include Ayatollah Ali Movahedi Kermani, who defended the Guardian Council’s vetting process against the reformists; as well as Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Taskhiri, who told reporters “I believe that the correct way is Principalist, and the way of others, like Reformists or moderates, is the incorrect way.”

As Pendleton wrote on Sunday, “Many (but far from all) candidates described as Reformists in both the parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections are actually Moderates who were endorsed by Reformist leaders as a fallback after the Guardian Council disqualified most of the Reformists trying to run.”

The headlines however tell a different story. The Guardian, for example, says: “Iranian elections deal blow to hardliners as reformists make gains.” The BBC concludes: “Reformists win all 30 Tehran seats.” And on it goes.

Headline writers should be given some slack on this. After all, President Hassan Rouhani – a moderate, but no reformer – himself has celebrated the preliminary results in the elections as a major victory. After criticizing the disqualifications, he has held his tongue and tried to make the most of a bad situation, encouraging Iranians to vote nonetheless.

The same is true for many of the marginalized reformists. Khatami, who the state has decreed an unmentionable figure for Iranian media, took to the social network Telegram to urge his countrymen to vote. The logic here is that at the very least, voters could protest the most reactionary hardliners in favor of the slightly less reactionary hardliners. This is hardly a victory for democratic change in Iran. And that is what is important for Westerners trying to make sense of Iran’s elections. While Iranian politicians have to make the best of a bad hand, we don’t. Western journalists and analysts don’t need to confer legitimacy on illegitimate elections, nor should we call hardliners “reformists.” At the very least, it’s important to hold out a higher standard for the day real reformers are allowed to compete fairly for power in Iran.

And yet many of Iran’s alleged supporters in the West have gone along with the spin. Trita Parsi, an Iranian-Swedish activist whose U.S. organization played a key role in lobbying for the Iran nuclear deal, wrote on Sunday evening that critics of Friday’s election didn’t misread what he euphemistically called the “flaws in the Iranian political system.” Rather these critics “misread the strength of the Iranian society and the sophistication of the Iranian electorate, who once again have shown that they have the maturity and wisdom to change their society peacefully from within, without any support or interference from the outside.”

It’s quite something when an Iranian who claims to support the opening of Iran’s society praises the “maturity and wisdom” of an electorate offered “reformists” who support the disqualification of reformers.

But this is the magic of Iran’s elections. In the end, Iran’s supreme leader doesn’t need to defend their legitimacy. He has plenty in the West eager to do it for him.

NO NEW DAWN IN IRAN

No new dawn in Iran
By Ruthie Blum
Israel Hayom
March 1, 2016

For the past three years, the West has been tricking itself into seeing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a country undergoing a gradual process of reform. The outcome of Friday’s two elections – one for the Majlis (parliament) and the other for the Assembly of Experts – is serving as the latest mirage in the delusion.

In 2013, when Hassan Rouhani replaced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, the United States and Europe took it as a sign of a new dawn. Even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the chief mullah controlling Iran’s “elected” leader, came to understand that Rouhani was preferable to the volatile and fanatic Ahmadinejad, whose repeated pronouncements about wiping Israel off the map before attending to America were not serving Tehran in good stead.

Rouhani’s appearance on the international stage provided particular fantasy-fodder for supporters of a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons and to guarantee its regional, and eventually global, hegemony.

Those people today feel vindicated for two reasons. The first is that world powers finally did reach a nuclear deal with Iran. The second is that Rouhani’s “pro-deal” camp emerged victorious in the latest parliamentary election, and two of the most hard-line ayatollahs were voted out of the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with appointing the supreme leader. And considering Khamenei’s advancing age and questionable health, this clerical assembly, which sits for eight years, is likely to end up selecting his successor.

To understand why the above is no cause for celebration, two crucial things need to be kept in mind: the only thing the nuclear deal accomplished was to enable Iran to step up its nuclear program, but with lots more money at its disposal; and Rouhani is no moderate.

Indeed, Iran continues to assert its right to nuclear power, while flexing its military muscles nearly daily by testing missiles and threatening the West not to intervene. In addition, celebrations less than three weeks ago marking the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic state included chants of “death to America,” “death to Israel” and a reenactment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s humiliation of U.S. sailors who had strayed into Tehran’s territorial waters.

A review of Rouhani’s record also leaves little room for optimism. Though the Shiite cleric was not Khamenei’s preferred choice, he would never have been approved as a candidate in the first place if his revolutionary credentials had not been impeccable. And they certainly were.

Rouhani was a long-time Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini loyalist, who has always backed and spearheaded the quelling of any popular protests, employing any bloody means to nip them in the bud. The only real difference between him and his predecessor is in his strategic understanding of how to accomplish Iran’s goals by presenting himself as more palatable to the West.

In 1992, his eldest son committed suicide, leaving a note to this very effect, saying, “I hate your government, your lies, your corruption, your religion, your double-dealing and your hypocrisy. I am ashamed to live in an environment in which I am forced to lie to my friends every day and tell them that my father is not part of all this – to tell them that my father loves the nation and to know that the reality is far from this. I get nauseated when I see you, father, kissing Khamenei’s hand.”

But it was his resume that made Rouhani such an appropriate nuclear negotiator, a role he fulfilled for years. Addressing Iran’s Supreme Cultural Revolution Council in September 2005, he explained the purpose of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing: “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the Isfahan facility,” he said. “By creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work.”

It is this tactic that puts Rouhani in the “pragmatist” camp.

In July, after the completion of the nuclear deal was first announced – and then disputed as to its contents, perceived differently in Washington and Tehran – Rouhani made a speech to the Iranian public.

“Peace and blessings upon the pure souls of the prophets and the holy men, the great Prophet of Islam [Muhammad], the imams, the imam of the martyrs [Khomeini], and the exalted martyrs, especially the nuclear [scientists], and peace and blessings upon the Hidden Imam,” he began.

“We aspired to achieve four goals: The first was to continue the nuclear capabilities, the nuclear technology, and even the nuclear activity. The second was to remove the mistaken, oppressive, and inhuman sanctions. The third was to remove the Security Council resolutions that we see as illegitimate. The fourth was to remove the nuclear dossier from Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and the Security Council in general. All four goals have been achieved today.”

He later referred to Israel’s warnings about the deal. “The people in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Lebanon are happy, too, because the hollow efforts of the oppressive Zionist regime to thwart the negotiations during the past 23 months have failed,” he said, ending with a message to the Arab countries of the region.

“Do not be misled by the propaganda of the Zionist regime and the evil-mongers of this [Iranian] nation,” he cautioned. “Iran and its might are always your might. We see the security of the region as our security, and the stability of the region as our stability.”

Let us not kid ourselves. Rouhani’s showing in the elections does not signify a new era of freedom for the Iranian people. Nor does it indicate a shift away from the regime’s sponsorship of global terrorism. On the contrary, if anything, it could provide American voters with a false sense of national – and international – security that is utterly unwarranted.

THE VICTIMS OF WISHFUL THINKING ABOUT IRAN

The Victims of Wishful Thinking about Iran
By Saeid Golkar
The National Interest
February 21, 2016

The implementation of the nuclear deal, the recent release of several American prisoners held by Iran and the swift release of U.S. Navy personnel captured by the Iranian military all perpetuate the belief that Iran wishes to resume open and benevolent relations with the West and the United States. Some even hope this will lead to the gradual implementation of democracy in Iran. But this analysis is premature. Ruling hardliners continue to resist reforms even as they present a façade of reform to the rest of the world.

Consider the recent political events in Iran. In October, Iran tested mid-range ballistic missiles – in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions – despite having just signed a treaty aimed at preventing nuclear proliferation. Then, the detention of American sailors, which seemed to be resolved amicably, was later revealed to be an antagonistic exercise after the regime broadcasted footage showing the sailors held at gunpoint and humiliated while in custody. Ayatollah Khamenei later praised the decision of the naval commander to detain the American sailors, awarding him the most prestigious military medal in Iran.

Unfortunately, the nature of the Iranian government is such that it concentrates the most power among the least democratic institutions in the country. President Rouhani, the country’s elected executive, has been the face of Iran’s foreign relations, including negotiations for the recently implemented nuclear framework. But Iranian foreign policy is, in reality, controlled by the unelected Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Khamenei will not allow meaningful reforms in foreign policy or domestic politics, despite the reform-minded wishes of President Rouhani. The president is mainly an agent for the implementation of the Supreme Leader’s policies.

While Ayatollah Khamenei has allowed some semblance of political normalization to occur, he does not actually want the kind of pervasive normalization that will empower Iranians and lead to democracy. Rather, he wants Iran to be accepted in international diplomacy when it can benefit his country’s international image and geopolitical significance – but not when it would compromise the stability of his establishment regime. In other words, the Ayatollah desires selective normalization.

Khamenei’s goal is to create an international image of Iran as a stable nation with worldly institutions, instead of an isolated, adversarial, theocratic regime. This vision includes sincere relations with China and Russia – nations that, while ideologically distinct from Iran, will not push Iran to democratize.

The benefits of Ayatollah Khamenei’s foreign policy approach have already manifested themselves through sanctions relief and the legitimization of Iran’s nuclear research program. These developments are both the result of and will further contribute to the notion that Iran is becoming a legitimate international actor. They will also bring economic benefits almost exclusively to the country’s elite.

The hardliners aren’t afraid to wield power to ensure that their authority is not substantially challenged. With upcoming parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections on February 26, the Guardian Council has, within its constitutional authority, disqualified 99 percent of reformists who registered to run in these elections. Not only will this harm President Rouhani’s ability to influence legislation, it will also threaten his control of the executive branch.

The pragmatists’ inability to succeed legislatively will likely frustrate reform-minded citizens, who will voice their discontent with their representatives, namely President Rouhani, in the next election. This is the process that allowed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardline loyalist to the Islamic Revolution and the Supreme Leader, to succeed President Khatami in 2005, and it will all but assure that the hardliner policies will remain unchanged.

Even if President Rouhani wants to challenge the hardliner grip on foreign policy, his available recourse is limited. While he does have connections within the security establishment aligned with the Supreme Leader, Rouhani could not mobilize them to negotiate a deal allowing reformists to participate in the elections. Rouhani could decide to not hold elections, but this is extremely unlikely and would have its own consequences for the public’s perception of his commitment to democracy.

As it stands, the true nature of the Iranian government, in relation to both the international community and its internal affairs, is unlikely to change anytime soon. The hardliner regime’s propensity for normalization with select members of the international community is meaningless without sincere normalization with the United States and the West, and elections will continue to be manipulated in favor of hardliners at the expense of pragmatists and reformists. Neither normalization nor democratization in Iran are likely to occur soon, and those suggesting otherwise are victims of wishful thinking.

(Saeid Golkar is a visiting fellow for Iran policy at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an adjunct professor for the Middle East and North African Studies Program)