ARTICLES

“AFTER THE WOMEN’S MARCH”

After the Women’s March
By David Brooks
New York Times
January 24, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/opinion/after-the-womens-march.html

The women’s marches were a phenomenal success and an important cultural moment. Most everybody came back uplifted and empowered. Many said they felt hopeful for the first time since Election Day. But these marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.

In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were “reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change.”

These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities. But this is 2017. Ethnic populism is rising around the world. The crucial problems today concern the way technology and globalization are decimating jobs and tearing the social fabric; the way migration is redefining nation-states; the way the post-World War II order is increasingly being rejected as a means to keep the peace.

All the big things that were once taken for granted are now under assault: globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the American-led global order. If you’re not engaging these issues first, you’re not going to be in the main arena of national life.

Second, there was too big a gap between Saturday’s marches and the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Sometimes social change happens through grass-roots movements – the civil rights movement. But most of the time change happens through political parties: The New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan Revolution. Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.

Without the discipline of party politics, social movements devolve into mere feeling, especially in our age of expressive individualism. People march and feel good and think they have accomplished something. They have a social experience with a lot of people and fool themselves into thinking they are members of a coherent and demanding community. Such movements descend to the language of mass therapy.

It’s significant that as marching and movements have risen, the actual power of the parties has collapsed. Marching is a seductive substitute for action in an antipolitical era, and leaves the field open for a rogue like Trump.

Finally, identity politics is too small for this moment. On Friday, Trump offered a version of unabashed populist nationalism. On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces could have offered a red, white and blue alternative patriotism, a modern, forward-looking patriotism based on pluralism, dynamism, growth, racial and gender equality and global engagement.

Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word “pussy” in them. The definition of America is up for grabs. Our fundamental institutions have been exposed as shockingly hollow. But the marches couldn’t escape the language and tropes of identity politics.

Soon after the Trump victory, Prof. Mark Lilla of Columbia wrote a piece on how identity politics was dooming progressive chances. Times readers loved that piece and it vaulted to the top of the most-read charts.

But now progressives seem intent on doubling down on exactly what has doomed them so often. Lilla pointed out that identity politics isolates progressives from the wider country: “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”

Sure enough, if you live in blue America, the marches carpeted your Facebook feed. But The Times’s Julie Bosman was in Niles, Mich., where many women had never heard of the marches, and if they had, I suspect, they would not have felt at home at one.

Identity-based political movements always seem to descend into internal rivalries about who is most oppressed and who should get pride of place. Sure enough, the controversy before and after the march was over the various roles of white feminists, women of color, anti-abortion feminists and various other out-groups.

The biggest problem with identity politics is that its categories don’t explain what is going on now. Trump carried a majority of white women. He won the votes of a shocking number of Hispanics.

The central challenge today is not how to celebrate difference. The central threat is not the patriarchy. The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea.

I loathed Trump’s inaugural: It offered a zero-sum, ethnically pure, backward-looking brutalistic nationalism. But it was a coherent vision, and he is rallying a true and fervent love of our home.

If the anti-Trump forces are to have a chance, they have to offer a better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission, building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality.

The march didn’t come close. Hint: The musical “Hamilton” is a lot closer.

“I DIDN’T JOIN THE MARCH”

I didn’t join the march. I’ve had enough of Obama’s hierarchy of grievance
The women’s movement has turned into an attack on anyone who won’t subscribe to feminist orthodoxy
By Melissa Mackenzie
The Guardian
January 22, 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/22/enough-division-women-movement-celebrate-humanity

Women from all over America descended on Washington yesterday and uttered a collective primal scream of dissent against their latest rage object: Donald Trump. Women are afraid. They fear for their rights. They believe President Trump will strip them of their birth control, let them get pregnant with no hope to abort the pregnancy or have healthcare and throw them back in the kitchen. Or something.

I didn’t go on the march.

President Obama, and the social justice warriors who fuelled his presidency, divided the country by grievance groups. Men and women. Black and white. LGBQ and straight. And most comically, divided divisions. White, Asian, black and Native American women, some cis-gendered, some transgender, some even vegan – all very, very special.

The Women’s March has had a fair share of internal strife. Who should speak? White women need to sit down and shut up. Black lesbian women should have priority. They get a voice. Privileged people (ie, everyone who is not me) don’t.

This nastiness is inevitable. When there’s a hierarchy of grievance, he (she) who has suffered most gets top billing. It’s a race to become the ain’t-it-awful worst. This negativity forces people not to find solutions but to build bigger problems so they’ll get attention. Solutions diminish emotional fever and media focus. Therefore, issues can never resolve and, if they do, new problems must be created.

Enough, already. In the quest for, and conquering of, equal rights, women have run out of real outrages. They’ve won the battles. What to do now? Consolidate power. The way to do that is shame those who are mostly happy with the advances and want to enjoy their lives. It’s tough to maintain a warlike state. In the absence of an enemy, the elders must keep the acolytes busy being true believers. Those “other” than the most righteous better watch out.

The women who don’t believe liberal orthodoxy include the chief sacrament abortion – “other”. Men (obviously) are the “other.” The worst “other” group: white men who are patriarchal oppressors. Then the biggest, vaguest group of “others”: people of any stripe who do not abide closely enough to the true leftist dogma.

What good does labelling and “otherising” do? Well, there’s been tremendous power in claiming the mantle of the perpetually oppressed. There’s government money and corporate bullying and media attention. It also silences people with different views.

The argument isn’t working with women any more. American women are 47% of the workforce. They enjoy unprecedented choices. Twenty-six per cent of women choose not to work outside the home. They choose to care for their families. That’s a choice.

Women are divided almost evenly anti-abortion versus pro-abortion. Many women are married and like their husbands and sons. They don’t hate men. They don’t want division.

That’s where I find myself. I’m grateful for the advances women have made. Western American women are fortunate, indeed.

The bigger issue American women face now isn’t equality but community. The ceaseless divisiveness and nasty aggression towards men is a problem. The segmenting of people by superficialities, rather than finding common ground, is causing society to stretch at the seams. The constant emphasis on victimhood separates people rather than brings them together.

The point of the women’s movement was supposed to be to elevate women. It’s turned into a systemic attack on all people who don’t follow leftist, feminist orthodoxy.

So I opted out of the Women’s March, thank you. After eight years of separating people, I’d like the country to come together.

We didn’t need a march for women. We need to start seeing human individuals. We need to see Americans. We need to re-embrace the melting pot of cultures, peoples, creeds, colours and religions and see our common ideals and dreams. We need to remember our shared identity. We need to cherish and protect our freedom to become anything – even president of the United States.

Enough division. More e pluribus unum.

“WE NEED TO CALL OUT ANTI-SEMITISM EVEN WHEN IT IS POLITICALLY INCONVENIENT”

We need to call out anti-Semitism even when it is politically inconvenient or the prejudice will continue to metastasize
By Benjamin Gladstone
Tablet magazine
January 23, 2017

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/222676/jews-on-the-right-and-left-must-stop-excusing-and-start-challenging-anti-semitism-among-their-political-allies

It is generally assumed that the Jewish community, whatever its internal differences, takes anti-Semitism seriously. But as someone who has been reporting on the subject for some time, I’m beginning to suspect that’s not the case. Allow me to explain.

Whenever I write about right-wing anti-Semitism or my support for pro-peace activism in Israel, the harsh reaction of many conservative Jews often astonishes me. I’ve been accused, quite prematurely, of failing to raise Jewish children, and have been called everything from an “imbecile” to a Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, when I write about left-wing anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism that conceals it, the vitriol of my fellow left-wing Jews shocks me just as much, and stings all the more. After experiencing such backlash repeatedly, it has become clear to me that many of my fellow Jews are inclined to ignore anti-Semitism when it is expressed by people who share their politics.

This is a deeply dangerous dynamic. Both the political right and the political left in America have very real problems with anti-Jewish prejudice, and if we are serious about confronting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, we all need to be willing to stand up to our friends as well as our rivals. This will mean standing apart from both political poles at times, but that is not a new experience for Jews.

As a product of millennia of Diaspora dispersion, Jews have long been a people of in-betweens. Often straddling the line between two conflicting ethnic or ideological categories, we have historically been spurned by both. The czar forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews during World War I in part because the Germanic roots of the Yiddish language raised suspicions that Jews might betray Russia for Germany. In the years following that war, however, German nationalists accused Jews of being in league with Soviet Russia, one of many allegations that laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.

Likewise, in the Russian Civil War, Jews suffered pogroms at the hands of both armies – the Red Army regarded Jews as bourgeois capitalists, while the White Army regarded Jews as communist provocateurs. Among colonialists in Algeria, the Ligue antijuive (Anti-Jewish League) became one of the most crucial organs of French identity formation, while Algerian Arab nationalist factions like the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front) identified indigenous Algerian Jews with French colonialism. Today, even the Jewish state suffers from in-between status: Israel is just Ashkenazi enough for Iran and BDS to accuse it of European imperialism, but also Southwest Asian and Arab enough for American and European leaders to condescend to it, interfere in its politics, and devalue its citizens’ lives like they do in other Southwest Asian and Arab countries.

In the United States, Jews are rapidly becoming an in-between people again. On the left, anti-Semitism thrives under the guise of anti-Zionism. At large rallies on my majority-leftist campus, I join my fellow students in declaring solidarity for movements that range from Black Lives Matter to Asian American rights, but not once have I heard Jewish issues make the list of demands at campus demonstrations. Many of the same people who march against other forms of oppression and discrimination openly support BDS, a movement that explicitly promotes discrimination against a single nationality and implicitly against an ethno-religious group. Some of my leftist peers express discomfort with the existence of a majority-Jewish fraternity on campus and vigorously defend campus anti-Zionists even when they cross the line into blatant anti-Semitism by protesting Hillel’s participation in social justice conversations.

At the same time, anti-Semitism is rising sharply on the right. Jewish journalists have been increasingly targeted with Holocaust imagery, and I have seen a dramatic uptick in right-wing anti-Semitic responses to my own writing. There has been an increase in Holocaust-evoking graffiti incidents at my former high school. Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan grow more emboldened by the day. The new Republican president has retweeted anti-Semites and their memes, echoed classical anti-Semitic tropes in his conspiratorial closing campaign ad, and expressed a conviction that the Republican Jewish Coalition wouldn’t back him because he wouldn’t allow the Jews to influence his government. His Jewish family members do not make him any less anti-Semitic, just as his female family members do not make him any less misogynistic.

American Jewry thus finds itself, once again, in-between. My experiences on campus make clear to me that the left, which tends to regard Jews as wealthy, privileged, and white and to project that image (falsely) onto Israel, does not regard Jewish rights as a priority. My experiences off-campus make clear to me that the right, which is increasingly host to white supremacists who also regard Jews as wealthy and powerful but see us as an enemy of whiteness, is no better off.

How do we push back against this encroachment on both ends? It starts with uniting against the threat, not excusing it where it is inconvenient.

One of the many dangers of being an in-between people is that our liminal status can divide us. During World War I, even while the Russian army evacuated Jews from their homes and the German army used falsified data about Jewish soldiers to blame them for military defeats, Jews fought on both sides, dying by the thousands to defend the flags of their rival anti-Semitic monarchies. I fear that Jews in America are beginning to fall into the same pattern, defending political movements that have troubling relations with the Jews without addressing Jewish issues among their fellow activists.

None of this is to say that Jews should not be involved in political and social movements. Personally, I align myself firmly with the left and am politically active. But I also try to hold my friends and fellow activists accountable for the ways in which they handle Jewish concerns. My fear is that Jews on both sides of the aisle are prioritizing Jewish issues only when doing so benefits their respective political causes. There are exceptions, but they are not the rule.

My fellow leftist Jews often take the easy path. They ignore or deny the existence of anti-Semitism on the left and join their non-Jewish friends in gaslighting (dismissing lived personal experiences as illegitimate or imagined) those of us who try to speak out about it. Occasionally, they even try to prove their loyalty to the hard left by joining the anti-Zionist movement and offering themselves as tokens.

At the same time, right-wing Jews, and even Jews in the political center, are often hesitant to call out anti-Semitism on the political right. Many leftist Jews have been disappointed to see so little reaction from centrist and non-partisan Jewish groups to the rise of Trump and the anti-Semitic far-right. The decision of the fringe right-wing Zionist Organization of America to unreservedly embrace the Trump administration made my stomach turn. Meanwhile, many centrist Jewish organizations, while not actively endorsing the ZOA’s activities or odious Trump advisers like Stephen Bannon, have remained conspicuously silent about them.

But as long as Jews only call out anti-Semitism when it is convenient for their political allies, the bigotry will continue to metastasize. We need to prioritize anti-Semitism, not instrumentalize it.

This is a time of political divisiveness in America, and the in-between status of the Jews is increasingly being laid bare. As leftist and centrist/rightist Jews rally behind our respective sides and toe the party lines of political movements that don’t value Jewish issues, we risk ignoring the problems that threaten all of us. Jews can exist on opposite sides of the political divide, but we ought to be united against anti-Semitism across the political spectrum. As a young, progressive Jew, it is a priority for me to defeat anti-Semitism and the anti-Zionism that masks it on the left just as it is a priority for me to take on right-wing anti-Semitism. It should be just as high a priority for those who disagree with me politically to confront anti-Semitism within their own ranks.

If Jews on both sides of the political divide only raise Jewish concerns like anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism when it is convenient to do so or when it supports our political aims, our activism is doomed to fail. Our Jewish rights advocacy ceases to be an end in and of itself and becomes a political tool to bolster movements that are increasingly hostile to us and to our needs. In order to be effective, we must be willing to call out our allies as well as our opponents. As long as Jews are an in-between people – as long as neither the left nor the right is willing to genuinely champion all Jewish issues – we, as Jews, need to shoulder that responsibility ourselves, and together.

(Benjamin Gladstone has written for the New York Times and The Forward.)

* 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. Leaders in Middle East and beyond say they are ‘optimistic’ about Trump’s presidency
2. Obama makes the right move on Manning
3. Some olive trees are deemed more important than others
4. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid: “Trump is a great friend of Israel” (France 24)
5. “Saudi Arabia ‘optimistic’ about Trump’s Rule” (AFP, Jan. 17, 2017)
6. “In Middle East, leaders want Trump to be their friend” (Wall St Journal, Jan. 16, 2017)
7. “Trump’s U.N. nominee to blast world body over Israel” (Reuters, Jan. 17, 2017)
8. “Maduro denounces ‘hate campaign’ aimed at Donald Trump” (AFP, Jan. 17, 2017)

LEADERS IN MIDDLE EAST AND BEYOND SAY THEY ARE ‘OPTIMISTIC’ ABOUT TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

[Notes by Tom Gross]

I include a number of articles below (featuring generally supportive views of Donald Trump from leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Israel and Venezuela). These are not meant as an endorsement for Trump, who will assume office in two days time, but are attached to highlight international viewpoints that many other American media are reluctant to report on.

The British and Australian governments have also articulated fairly strong pro-Trump views in recent days, and Britain refused to sign President Obama’s latest anti-Israel imitative (at the Paris conference on Sunday), reportedly on the basis of conversations between the UK government and the incoming Trump administration, who urged Britain not to sign a document that will make peace efforts harder to accomplish.

This is the first time in decades that Britain and Australia adopted more sympathetic positions towards Israel than a U.S. Secretary of State (John Kerry).

OBAMA MAKES THE RIGHT MOVE ON MANNING

On a different matter, it seems to me that President Obama did the right thing yesterday in commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, which was unduly harsh.

Manning had been sentenced to 35 years – by far the longest prison sentence ever for a whistle-blower in the U.S. – for revealing American military and diplomatic cables.

(The average prison sentence in other leak cases has been one to three years. None of the documents Manning disclosed were classified as “top secret”. She has now served almost 7 years. She (then he) was badly mistreated while under interrogation by the U.S.)

While working as a low-level intelligence analyst Manning copied thousands of military incident logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which, among other things, exposed abuses of detainees by Iraqi military officers working with American forces and showed that civilian deaths in the Iraq war were much higher than official estimates.

Obama’s commutation yesterday has been widely criticized by many Republicans and Democrats.

SOME OLIVE TREES ARE DEEMED MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS

The double standard of media covering the Middle East continues to be at times extraordinary.

To cite one small example: When, on rare occasions, the Israeli army has cut down a few olive trees for security reasons, it has made major (if not front page) news in the New York Times.

But when NATO member Turkey, cuts down olives trees on a massive scale, as it did this week (in order to build security wall in Kurdistan), this is all but ignored by major international media.

ISRAELI OPPOSITION LEADER YAIR LAPID: “TRUMP IS A GREAT FRIEND OF ISRAEL”

This interview yesterday on the French-government international TV network France 24, with Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, is worth watching in full if you have time.

Lapid, leader of Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid party, is currently ahead in the polls in Israel and is the most likely replacement for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were elections be held today and were Netanyahu to lose.

Lapid makes some robust, but politely put, remarks in near fluent English, which you can watch here.

***

I attach four articles below.

***

Among previous dispatches relating to Donald Trump:

* I’m a Muslim, female immigrant and voted for Trump (& Turkey issues travel warning to U.S.) (November 14, 2016)

* Senior UK politician calls for UK to join US in moving embassy to Jerusalem (Dec. 16, 2016)

* Trump’s Israel advisors likely to usher in era of improved US-Israel ties (Nov. 10, 2016)

ARTICLES

RAFSANJANI WAS IRAN’S MYTHICAL ‘MODERATE’

Rafsanjani Was Iran’s Mythical ‘Moderate’
Vain dreams of reform haven’t died with the Islamic Republic’s former president.
By Sohrab Ahmari
The Wall Street Journal
Jan. 9, 2017

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was the original Mr. Moderation. Western observers saw the former Iranian president as a sort of Deng Xiaoping in clerical robes: a founder of the Islamic Republic who was destined to transform the country into a normal state. Rafsanjani, they thought, was too corrupt to be an ideologue.

Yet Rafsanjani, who died Sunday at 82, consistently defied such hopes. His life and legacy remind us that fanaticism and venality aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s a lesson in the persistence of Western fantasies about the Iranian regime.

Born to landed gentry in southeast Iran, Rafsanjani entered seminary at the holy city of Qom. There the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini adopted him as a protégé and revolutionary companion.

The totalitarian theocracy that replaced the Peacock Throne after the 1979 revolution was as much Rafsanjani’s creation as Khomeini’s. Khomeini provided the theological underpinnings for his model of absolute clerical rule. But it was Rafsanjani who fleshed out the ideas, as speaker of Parliament in the 1980s and president for much of the ‘90s.

Rafsanjani delivered the wake-up call to Iranian liberals and leftists, who still dreamt of sharing power with the Islamists. “Until we had our people in place,” he told one such liberal in 1981, “we were ready to tolerate [other] gentlemen on the stage.” But now the regime would brook no faction but those that followed the “Line of the Imam” – Khomeini. A decade of purges, prison rapes and executions followed.

Khomeini’s death in 1989 occasioned Rafsanjani’s worst political misstep. Thinking he could puppeteer events behind the scenes, Rafsanjani successfully promoted his archrival, Ali Khamenei, as the next supreme leader. But Mr. Khamenei, far more assertive than Rafsanjani had imagined, soon consolidated power.

The regime’s Western apologists framed that rivalry as a genuine ideological conflict between the “hard-line” Mr. Khamenei and the “pragmatic,” “moderate” Rafsanjani (along with others, such as current President Hassan Rouhani). President Obama’s nuclear deal was premised on the same fantasy: Rafsanjani had accumulated vast, ill-gotten wealth – here’s someone with whom we can do business.

Yet Rafsanjani never failed to follow the “Line of the Imam,” not least in foreign affairs. Khomeini turned terror into a plank of Iranian statecraft, and so it remained.

In 1992, during Rafsanjani’s presidency, Iranian operatives gunned down four dissidents at a Berlin restaurant. The “pragmatic” Rafsanjani regularly sat on a “Committee for Special Operations” that oversaw foreign assassinations, according to an Iranian intelligence officer who testified at a criminal trial in Germany.

Argentine prosecutors have marshaled evidence establishing the Rafsanjani government’s role in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, both in Buenos Aires. The two attacks killed more than 100 people.

The great pragmatist was also president when, in 1996, Iranian agents bombed Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. service members. And it was Rafsanjani who said in 2001: “If one day the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.”

Still the illusions die hard. Minutes after Rafsanjani’s death was announced, the New York Times’s Tehran correspondent tweeted that it “is a major blow to moderates and reformists in Iran.”

OBITUARY: ALI AKBAR HASHEMI RAFSANJANI

Obituary: Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Calculating former president of Iran who took advantage of turbulence in the Middle East to become immensely rich and powerful
The Times (of London)
January 9, 2017

With the sole exception of his mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was the most powerful man in Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979, and he went on to serve as president for eight years, from 1989 to 1997, though he lost to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 election. Known in Iran as “the Shark”, he was one of the architects of the removal of moderate politicians from power in the first two years after the revolution and bore heavy responsibility for the country’s slide towards repression at home and terrorism abroad.

Although he became a close confidant of the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, he had moved in a more moderate and reformist direction in recent years, and he fell out with Khameini over the disputed elections of 2009.

A Machiavellian conspirator of many years’ experience, he had thrived in the lawlessness of the revolutionary period, his way to the top assisted by the heavy toll that terrorist opponents took of the new regime’s officialdom. Although he was closely identified with the country’s religious establishment he was eventually seen as a conservative pragmatist who was open to closer ties with the West.

He was a political survivor and an immensely skilful operator. The first president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr – a political enemy who he helped remove from power – remarked that Rafsanjani ingratiated himself with Khomeini by playing the court jester.

“He’s a man who makes people laugh,” Bani-Sadr said in 1989. “It’s a great art. He uses this to gain his objectives. He’s a political animal. He’s not brilliant as an organiser and he doesn’t have too many original ideas, but he’s a manipulator and he’s highly intelligent.’’ Rafsanjani often delivered the weekly sermon – more political than religious – at Friday prayer sessions at Tehran University. He would speak for hours without notes, clutching an automatic rifle and cracking jokes.

He was born in 1935 in the village of Behraman in the province of Rafsanjan on the fringe of the central Iranian desert into a family of relatively well-to-do peasants, owning orchards of pistachio nut trees. After a primary education in Rafsanjan, he was sent to the shrine city of Qom at the age of 14 to become a mullah.

Iran, which had until recently been occupied by Allied troops, was going through an unstable period with the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and right-wing Muslim fundamentalists, the Islamic Fedayeen or Sacrificials, regularly assassinating politicians, scholars and journalists. Hashemi, as he was then known, became an admirer of the latter group, gravitating towards one of their mentors, Ayatollah Khomeini.

By that time, the Sacrificials had been broken up by the authorities and had given birth to a network of secret cells, which Hashemi joined in Qom after the bloody riots of 1963.

In 1964, Hashemi was conscripted into the army but deserted after only two months, claiming later that the police had planned to prosecute him for his clandestine activities. During Khomeini’s exile in Iraq until 1978 he spent a total of about four years in prison, partly for his association with the assassins of Hassan-Ali Mansour, the prime minister, and his support of the mujahidin urban guerrillas who had murdered several US military advisers. His part seems to have been confined to pamphleteering and strengthening the ideological commitment of the terrorists rather than taking direct action.

Outside prison, he went into partnership with fundamentalist merchants dealing in land and building houses for Tehran’s booming population when the economy flourished as oil prices rose in the 1960s and 1970s. The morality of his mercantile activities has been questioned by critics. He claimed that their main purpose was to forge stronger links with the merchant class in Tehran and the provinces; at any rate, from the relatively austere background of a desert village he rapidly became a wealthy man, and was thought to have become a dollar billionaire.

After the revolution and Khomeini’s triumphant return from exile in France, Hashemi, now known as Rafsanjani, was appointed by the Ayatollah to the Council of the Revolution. After the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, he joined the Supreme Defence Council, on which he served as the Speaker of the Islamic Majlis, or parliament, and, more importantly, as Khomeini’s personal representative. He had served his mentor well. As acting minister of the interior in 1979 he supervised the controversial plebiscite that restricted the nation’s choice to installing an Islamic republic or bringing back the monarchy. He also helped found the Islamic Republican Party, which forced the removal of the moderate prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and the liberal president, Bani-Sadr. He supported the invasion of the US embassy in November 1979 and the holding of 52 diplomats for 444 days.

An important factor in his subsequent rise was the disappearance from the scene of around 100 leading clerics and officials at the hands of a number of left-wing and Islamic guerrilla groups, mainly the mujahidin. Rafsanjani’s close identification with Khomeini enabled him as Speaker to build up the Majlis, or parliament, as the dominant organ of the state. For many years he was fireproof: even when his political enemies disclosed that he had conducted secret negotiations with Robert McFarlane, the former US national security adviser, he was not dismissed. Instead, some of his opponents were hanged for conspiracy.

His readiness to be named acting commander-in-chief of Iran’s armed forces in June 1988, when the country was suffering a string of seemingly irreversible setbacks in the war with Iraq, surprised observers who had come to know him as a sly, calculating man. As Khomeini seemed like he would fight to the end against Iraq, the suspicion was that Rafsanjani believed the Ayatollah would die soon, by which time he would be in a position to inherit his political powers.

He played a central role in the arms-for-hostages deal with the United States in 1985-86 – the Iran-Contra affair – and appeared vulnerable when his rivals tried to discredit him. Typically, he outmanoeuvred them all and came out on top. As president, Rafsanjani excluded radicals from the government and introduced economic liberalisation. In foreign policy he was a pragmatist, improving relations with Germany, France, Japan and the Soviet Union. But as the price of oil dropped, the economy suffered, inflation rose, and his popular vote declined steeply, though he was re-elected.

His role in supporting Iranian terrorism abroad led him into several controversies: the Argentinian government wanted to question him for his alleged role in the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building in Buenos Aires in 1994, which killed 85 people and injured hundreds. During a terror trial in Germany in 1997 he was accused of organising the murder of Iranian opposition activists in Europe.

After losing the 2005 election he became a vocal critic of Ahmadinejad, calling for political prisoners to be freed and for opposition parties to be given more freedom, as long as they operated within the constitution. Ahmadinejad accused him of corruption, a common accusation in Iran; he responded by complaining about the president’s “insults, lies and false allegations.”

His last years were spent as the head of Iran’s Expediency Council, which mediates between parliament and the influential Guardian Council. He was also a member of the Assembly of Experts, which appoints the supreme leader, but his bid for the presidency in 2013 was blocked.

In 1958 he married Effat Marashi, who survives him. For all his pre-eminence, two of his children attracted the regime’s attention for their activism. His daughter Faezeh Hashemi, an activist, politician and journalist, was arrested after addressing a rally and served six months in jail. His son Mehdi became head of the state-owned oil company, Gaz Iran. He was arrested in 2012 on charges of inciting unrest but was released a few months later.

Another son, Mohsen, became an engineer, and served as chief executive of the Tehran metro, as well as serving the government in an advisory capacity when his father was president. Yasser became a businessman running a successful import and export business in Tehran. Another daughter, Fatemah, went on to become head of Iran’s Women’s Solidarity Association.

Rafsanjani was, at times, described as a moderate. He did not qualify for the description. His was a shrewd mind moulded by many years of conspiring. He manipulated and achieved a position of leadership in whichever political grouping seemed to be in the ascendant.

(Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president of Iran, was born on August 25, 1934. He died of a heart attack on January 8, 2017, aged 82)

AP EXCLUSIVE: DIPLOMATS: IRAN TO GET NATURAL URANIUM BATCH

AP Exclusive: Diplomats: Iran to get natural uranium batch
January 9, 2017

https://apnews.com/db5a8d6cad764c208322939ed84a0d49

VIENNA (AP) — Iran is to receive a huge shipment of natural uranium from Russia to compensate it for exporting tons of reactor coolant, diplomats say, in a move approved by the outgoing U.S. administration and other governments seeking to keep Tehran committed to a landmark nuclear pact.

Two senior diplomats said the transfer recently agreed by the U.S. and five other world powers that negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran foresees delivery of 116 metric tons (nearly 130 tons) of natural uranium. U.N. Security Council approval is needed but a formality, considering five of those powers are permanent Security Council members, they said.

Uranium can be enriched to levels ranging from reactor fuel or medical and research purposes to the core of an atomic bomb. Iran says it has no interest in such weapons and its activities are being closely monitored under the nuclear pact to make sure they remain peaceful.

Tehran already got a similar amount of natural uranium in 2015 as part of negotiations leading up to the nuclear deal, in a swap for enriched uranium it sent to Russia. But the new shipment will be the first such consignment since the deal came into force a year ago.

The diplomats, whose main focus is Iran’s nuclear program, demanded anonymity Monday because they are not allowed to discuss the program’s confidential details.

They spoke ahead of a meeting this week in Vienna of representatives of Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany to review Iranian complaints that the U.S. was reneging on sanctions relief pledges included in the nuclear deal.

The natural uranium agreement comes at a sensitive time. With the incoming U.S. administration and many U.S. lawmakers already skeptical of how effective the nuclear deal is in keeping Iran’s nuclear program peaceful over the long term, they might view it as further evidence that Tehran is being given too many concessions.

The diplomats said any natural uranium transferred to Iran after the deal came into effect would be under strict surveillance by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency for 25 years after implementation of the deal.

They said Tehran has not said what it would do with the uranium but could choose to store it or turn it into low-enriched uranium and then export it for use as reactor fuel.

Despite present restrictions on its enrichment program, the amount of natural uranium is significant should Iran decide to keep it in storage, considering its potential uses once some limits on Tehran’s nuclear activities start to expire in less than a decade.

David Albright, whose Institute of Science and International Security often briefs U.S. lawmakers on Iran’s nuclear program, says the shipment could be enriched to enough weapons-grade uranium for more than 10 simple nuclear bombs, “depending on the efficiency of the enrichment process and the design of the nuclear weapon.”

The swap is in compensation for the 70 metric tons (77 tons) of heavy water exported by Iran to the United States, Russia and Oman since the nuclear agreement went into effect.

Heavy water is used to cool a type of reactor that produces more plutonium than reactors cooled by light water. Like enriched uranium, plutonium can be turned into the fissile core of a nuclear weapon.

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