Lobelog – Iran Lobby

Iran Regime Supporters Continue Defense of Controversies

August 28, 2016 by admin

Iran Regime Supporters Continue Defense of Controversies

Supporters of the Iranian regime have lately begun a full frontal assault against the tidal wave of criticisms and bad news afflicting the regime ranging from the disclosures of the $400 million ransom payment for American hostages to a just announced crackdown against social media users in Iran.

The embarrassing revelations about the Obama administration’s use of the $400 million as “leverage” over the Americans being held hostage was the key issue causing consternation among Iran lobby supporters.

The simple correlation of money for hostages resonated with Americans and forced many of the more prominent members of the Iran lobby to go into virtual hibernation on the issue. One of the defendants of the cash swap was a policy intern and student writing in Politico.

Michael Wackenreuter made the argument that American diplomacy is often rife with venturing into “gray areas” where leaders have had to compromise core principles. He harkens back to the Reagan administration’s upholding of an asset transfer to Iran the Carter administration negotiated. The difficulty with his position is that none of his examples are applicable to this situation.

The issue is one of perception and the perception involved here is not from the U.S. viewpoint, but rather those of the mullahs in Tehran because it what they believe that has the most impact and ramifications for the future. If they believe that holding hostages yields important benefits such as concessions or cash and there are no repercussions, then why not keep doing it?

It is this perception that now dominates as the Iranian regime once again goes on a hostage-taking binge including more Americans and yet again it finds there are no consequences for their actions.

That, more than anything else, is why the Iran lobby is fighting so hard against these negative stories because if Iran was indeed held accountable for its actions, then the narrative and even the regime itself would change dramatically.

That much was on display with Ali Gharib’s post in Lobelog.com, a well-known water carrier for the Iranian regime, in which he tries to dispute the Wall Street Journal story by Jay Solomon looking back at the year since the nuclear deal was reached and how ineffective it has been in curbing Iran’s more aggressive and militant intentions.

Chief among Gharib’s contentions is the alleged victory by “moderates” in parliamentary elections in Iran, but he himself neglects to mention the eradication of thousands of candidates from the ballot by the senior clerical leadership of the regime, including virtually every moderate or dissident candidate not already in prison or on their way to the gallows.

“Then there is the hope—again, not the prime aim—of the deal’s proponents that Iran’s foreign policy might become more moderate as well. As Solomon points out in his bill of particulars, that has not been the case: the Iranian government has used the financial benefits brought by the accord to beef up its military spending, and still involves itself in nefarious ways in the Middle East, continuing its support to unsavory groups like Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis and, especially, its robust assistance to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,” Gharib said, even admitting the how the Iran regime continues to wage war throughout the region.

Even with all these efforts to defend the regime, the criticisms against how the U.S. has appeased the mullahs has mounted as the evidence grows of the ramifications of such actions.

Aaron David Miller, vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, took to the Wall Street Journal to explain how the dangerous the precedent is in bowing to Iran’s demands for the future.

“Here’s the larger and more potentially damaging perception beyond the general embarrassment: In the Middle East, strength and negotiating acumen are prized; they demonstrate power and credibility. And the region tends to consider actions and strategy in a time frame that stretches far beyond the four- and eight-year scale of U.S. politics. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s handling of Iran in this situation plays into the narrative that the U.S. is weak and feckless and behaving as if it doesn’t know what it’s doing,” he writes.

“Some will see this as proof that the U.S. is unable or unwilling to contain Iran’s influence in the region, whether because the administration fears that pushing the Iranians too hard on Syria might jeopardize the international agreement over Tehran’s nuclear program–a seminal achievement for Mr. Obama–or because the U.S. is wary of deeper involvement in the region,” he adds.

All of which feeds into the narrative of a weakened U.S. foreign policy that lacks focus and commitment, as displayed when the ransom payment became the butt of a joke from a foreign leader.

President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte recently remarked that all it takes to extract money out of the U.S. is to insult the country and hope U.S. officials come running to make amends with funds.

“After Kerry visited the Philippines, he left us $33 million,” Duterte told an audience at Camp Lapu Lapu. “I told myself, ‘this seems cool. Let’s take a swipe at them again so they will make amends with money.’”

The perceived lack of repercussions in the face of growing Iranian human rights abuses has started a flurry of provocative actions, the latest of which was that the cyber-arm of Iran’s repressive Revolutionary Guard says it has summoned, detained and warned some 450 administrators of social media groups in recent weeks.

The announcement Tuesday, carried on a website affiliated with the Guard’s cyber arm, says those detained used social media like the messaging app Telegram, which is popular in Iran.

The announcement says those detained or summoned made posts that were considered immoral, were related to modeling, or which insulted religious beliefs. It says the Guard only took action after “judicial procedures” were completed, without elaborating.

The move augurs a new phase in a domestic crackdown in Iran, one that the Iran lobby will surely work to divert attention from.

By Laura Carnahan

Pressure Mounts to Keep Iranian Regime Out of Financial System

April 6, 2016 by admin

Arrangement of various world currencies including Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, Swiss Franc and Russian Ruble pictured in Warsaw January 26, 2011. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

The American dollar is the world standard for global currencies. Its fluctuations set the pricing in currency markets, allows companies and governments to transact business around the world and provide certainty in holding reserves and assets in turbulent times.

The role of U.S. currency is so integral to conducting business, the Iranian regime’s removal from the global banking system and access to U.S. dollars crippled its export economy and was one of the most significant drivers in forcing the mullahs back to the negotiating table after putting enormous pressure on their finances.

The nuclear agreement with the Iranian regime reached last year provided for an easing of sanctions including allowing the regime access to previously frozen assets, but the agreement did not affect certain restrictions that remained in place keeping Iran out of U.S. currency markets for non-nuclear sanctions such as support and sponsorship of terrorism.

This has proven to be somewhat of an Achilles heel for the mullahs since not having complete and unfettered access to U.S. dollars hampers its ability to conduct international exports such as exchanging euros for dollars for taking advantage of currency floats to earn additional money from the estimated $100 billion in assets it now has access to in overseas accounts.

Relaxation of those restrictions would also greatly ease the ability of family members of the ruling mullahs and members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps to move the illicit funds they have squirrelled away over the past decade in engaging in black market petroleum sales and transfers of weapons and other banned technologies to enrich themselves.

This has become such a thorny issue for the regime that virtually all of its leaders, including Ali Khamenei, Hassan Rouhani and Javad Zarif, have denounced the U.S. for not fully lifting access and threatened to walk away from the nuclear agreement as a result. To say their complaints carry a hint of desperation would be understatement.

The Iran lobby has followed similarly in calling for a complete lifting of all sanctions and warning of a collapse of the agreement that could threaten the region with more disorder, which any rational person would find hard to believe when you look at Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq.

The Obama administration has typically floated some trial balloons to give the regime access to U.S. currency through loopholes creating offshore clearing houses not tied to the U.S. banking system that foreign banks could access to exchange dollars.

The reaction from Congress has been unified and uniformly negative to the idea. A senior State Department official reassured concerned lawmakers on Tuesday that the Obama administration is not planning to allow Iran access to the U.S. financial system or use of the U.S. dollar for transactions.

“The rumors and news that have appeared in the press … are not true,” Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

U.S. lawmakers have expressed deep concern about recent reports that the administration might let Iran use the dollar in some business transactions.

That concern was reinforced in an editorial by Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in the Washington Post.

“Iran has yet to see the economic growth it wants from President Obama’s nuclear deal, and it’s demanding additional concessions — above and beyond the agreement — in return for nothing. Specifically, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants the United States to end sanctions aimed at curbing Iran’s funding for terrorism and illicit weapons so Iran can gain access to the U.S. financial system, where the majority of international business is conducted,” Royce said.

“This is an alarming departure from the Obama administration’s position just months ago. Indeed, when selling the nuclear deal to the American people last year, the administration repeatedly stressed to Congress that key terrorism, missile and human rights sanctions against Iran would continue to be vigorously enforced,” he added.

“Iran has seen what Obama will do to preserve his nuclear deal, and it’s taking full advantage. The United States cannot cave again. Congress should make clear that until the Iranian regime drops its illicit missile program and funding of terrorism, it won’t receive another dime of sanctions relief,” Royce said.

Royce is correct in pointing out how the world has gotten virtually nothing in return for the nuclear agreement after one year with Iran engaging in a broad range of militant and aggressive moves both home and abroad. The sheer number of provocative acts has dismayed supporters of the regime and put them on the defensive in trying to explain away everything from missile launches to mass executions to interception of illegal weapons shipments.

For Iran lobby supporters such as the National Iranian American Council and media boosters such as Jim Lobe of Lobelog, their task has been to focus on the idea that the U.S. is failing the nuclear agreement and not the other way around.

Lobe attempted to use results from public opinion polls done in Iran to show how the Iranian people were growing more distrustful of the U.S.

“Confidence that the U.S. will abide by the deal has also slipped—from 45% in a September survey by the Gallup organizations to 29%, according to CISSM. Although 41% of respondents said in September that they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ confident about Washington’s compliance, the new poll found that figure had risen to 66%. The pollsters did not probe the reasons for the increase in skepticism, although it may relate either to the continuing imposition of sanctions as well as coverage of the election campaign here,” Lobe writes.

His reasoning is as silly as the mullahs blaming the U.S. for the threat of new sanctions for launching illegal ballistic missiles.

The Iranian people live in a society under harsh control by the mullahs where online activities are tracked and they are subjected to withering amounts of anti-American propaganda on a daily basis.

Is it any wonder they feel negative upon seeing no improvement in their lives one year after the deal as Rouhani has promised to keep unfrozen assets overseas to help purchase new weapons and Khamenei has vowed to maintain a “resistance economy?”

These are not the acts of a regime interested in improving the lives of the Iranian people and we should not be swayed their continued propaganda.

By Michael Tomlinson

Holding Iran Accountable Starts by Not Believing Iran Lobby

March 11, 2016 by admin

Holding Iran Accountable Starts by Not Believing Iran Lobby

The Iran lobby, consisting of lobbying groups such as the National Iranian American Council and media platforms like Lobelog.com, has long argued that agreement on a nuclear deal would bring about a new period of moderation within Iran and smooth the way for normalized relations.

Since the agreement was completed last summer, the Iranian regime has acted nothing like a moderate government engaging in a wide variety of foreign policy excesses such as going all-in on the Syrian civil war and stepping up support for Houthi rebels in Yemen, to instituting a harsh crackdown at home imprisoning dissidents and journalists and keeping the gallows busy by marching over 2,200 people to their deaths over the past two years.

Throughout it all, the Iran lobby has worked hard to maintain its charade and keep journalists believing in this false narrative no matter how incredible the proof has been otherwise. One example of this is a Q&A in the New York Times by Rick Gladstone in which he regurgitates many of the Iran lobby’s myths. For example, Gladstone asks:

Is Iran honoring the nuclear agreement? He writes it is according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but neglects to mention admissions by the head of that agency that inspection protocols had been comprised at various points and full reporting may never be achievable;
Are recent missile tests prohibited under the nuclear agreement? He says no, such launchings are considered a separate issue, but neglects to mention that the regime pushed hard to unlink a host of issues such as ballistic missiles, human rights and support for terrorism from the deal, thereby allowing the regime a free hand to continue its illegal activities;
Iran’s parliamentary elections last month were supposed to have strengthened moderate supporters of Hassan Rouhani. So why is Iran provoking its critics by testing missiles? Gladstone explains that the launches are conducted by the Revolutionary Guard Corps which is outside of Rouhani’s control, but neglects to point out that Rouhani has been a willing supporter of these hardline tactics since his government has overseen one of the harshest crackdowns in 20 years against public dissent.

This militancy on the part of the Iranian regime was reinforced by boasts by senior military commanders that the tests would continue even though they are in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, which are being proven impotent by the lack of any consequences for these violations.

Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a senior commander for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that runs the regime’s missile program, told state television that it has more missiles ready to launch, and they are for defensive purposes.

“Iran’s missile program will not stop under any circumstances,” Hajizadeh said. “We are always ready to defend the country against any aggressor.”

The fact that the argument over the regime’s violations have shifted from calling for swift action to debates over whether or not imposition of sanctions might jeopardize a nuclear agreement that has already proven ineffectual in curbing the regime demonstrates how weak the international response has become.

This broad policy of appeasing the mullahs has already generated severe negative consequences as Iran seeks to aggressive upgrade its military and rearm in the wake of its deep involvement in three ongoing proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen as well as a potential new arms race with its chief regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

Hajizadeh also announced that Iran is calling its own version of a spy drone, “Simorgh,” which is Iranian for “Phoenix,” according to the country’s state controlled media.

Iran’s version of the drone “was manufactured through reverse engineering of the U.S. drone, which was tracked and hunted down in Iran late in 2011, and has been equipped by the IRGC with bombing capability,” according to Fars News Agency.

This comes on the heels of an $8 billion shopping spree in Moscow by the Iranian regime and the imminent delivery of an advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missile system.

Most disturbing of all was the announcement by Ahmed Shaheed, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, that there had been a “staggering surge in the execution of at least 966 prisoners last year – the highest rate in over two decades,” Shaheed told a news briefing.

The number of executions are roughly double the number executed in 2010 and 10 times as many as were executed in 2005 and demonstrate how Rouhani’s promises of a more moderate government when he was elected were merely political window dressing.

“A large percentage of those executions are for drug offences and under Iran’s current drug laws, possession of 30 grams of heroin or cocaine would qualify for the death penalty. So there’s a number of draconian laws,” he said.

“Fundamental problems also exist with regard to the due process and fair trial rights of the accused,” Shaheed said.

“I continue to receive frequent and alarming reports about the use of prolonged solitary and incommunicado confinement, torture and ill-treatment, lack of access to lawyers and the use of confessions solicited under torture as evidence in trials – practices that clearly violate Iran’s own laws,” he said.

Hundreds of journalists, bloggers, activists and opposition figures “currently languish in Iran’s prisons and detention facilities,” he said.

None of which has stopped the Iran lobby from trying to divert attention to anything else as evidenced by an appearance by Jamal Abdi, of the NIAC, at a summit in Washington, DC aimed at criticizing the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

He spoke of how the Saudi regime tried to jeopardize the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran and criticized the visa restrictions the U.S. imposed on Iranians and Iranian dual nationals. He also spoke of how the U.S. is essentially “renting” the Saudi army to carry out the war in Yemen, and potentially even Syria, which is ironic considering that it was the Iranian regime’s support of the Assad regime in Syria and Houthi rebels in Yemen that started both conflicts in the first place.

All of which demonstrates how the Iran lobby will address any issue other than the current activities of the regime.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Priorities Do Not Include Human Rights Reforms

March 9, 2016 by admin

Iran Lobby Priorities Do Not Include Human Rights Reforms

If there has been one consistent aspect to the Iran lobby’s efforts to humanize and moderate the perception of the mullahs in Tehran, it has been the complete lack of criticism over the perennially awful human rights violations committed by the Iranian regime, especially under the first term of Hassan Rouhani’s “moderate” government.

The Iran lobby’s marching orders since the creation of advocacy groups such as the National Iranian American Council, has been to blunt the forceful voices of long-time critics of the Iranian regime such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and key members of Congress and the media and spin a counter-narrative of an Iran yearning to be moderate if only given the chance with a nuclear deal that freed it from crippling sanctions.

It’s a playbook that borrows heavily from how North Korea was able to develop nuclear weapons and advanced missile systems even after agreeing to restrict both under international agreements that it consistently violated. The mullahs calculated that the rest of the world, especially an incoming President Barack Obama, had little stomach for direct confrontation with the regime and took a gamble that it could muzzle dissent enough to reshape its image.

The NIAC, led by Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi, took on the challenge of spinning this new vision after the “election” of Hassan Rouhani and new warm and fuzzy kind of mullah who tweets and posts Instagram shots of him watching the World Cup sans clerical robes and turban.

While the Iranian regime was able to secure a nuclear deal and a lifting of sanctions, the “win” may prove illusory as the situation in the Middle East continues to deteriorate with a worsening situation in Syria, a full-blown proxy war is building with Saudi Arabia and an American presidential election that offers the remaining candidates with public policy positions that take a much harder line against Iran than the Obama administration.

To that end, the Iran lobby has begun to focus on two central goals in its PR push of late. One is to attack vocal opponents of the regime among the presidential candidates, especially candidates such as Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, as well as take jabs at Hillary Clinton’s recent statements warning Iran to refrain from continued aggression against its neighbors.

Long-time regime supporter, Ali Gharib, has been especially prolific in hurling invective against the Trump campaign, his latest salvos coming on noted Iran lobby blog, Lobelog.com, as well as a sarcastic diatribe against Carson in The Guardian.

In both cases, Gharib does what he does best, use snark and sarcasm to deflect from any serious discussion of the shortcomings of the Iranian regime, specifically the horrific abuses meted out against journalists, women, ethnic minorities, dissidents and Christians. Gharib cannot be bothered with these facts since he’s having too much fun mocking candidates.

But his attacks and those of Parsi and Marashi hide the genuine concern and fear Iran lobby supporters have which is a new incoming president would not be beholden to the agreements made by the Obama administration and would be have a free hand to chart their own foreign policy which addresses the key problem in the Middle East today, which is that Iran is at the heart of three proxy wars and supporter of three terrorist organizations and a dictatorial regime that has caused the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

Parsi, Gharib and other Iran lobbyists refuse to discuss the impending mass execution of 100 prisoners, nor the inexcusable mass killings of every adult male from a village in southern Iran.

The Norway-based Iran Human Rights group revealed on Friday that sources inside and outside Ghezel Hessar prison, including a prosecutor attached to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court, confirmed that the inmates were told that the country’s Supreme Court had upheld their sentences, and that they should prepare to be put to death.

The prospect of this mass execution for drug crimes comes just months after the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) inked a new $20 million deal with Iran to assist in its counter-narcotic efforts. Advocates against the excesses of the drug war have pilloried the UN for its dealings with Iran, which kills hundreds of people every year, including foreign nationals, over drug-related charges. Iran Human Rights estimates that more than 1,800 people were executed for drug crimes in Iran between 2010 and 2014, most without due process or access to proper legal representation.

The sheer barbarism of the Iranian regime is appalling and yet, the Iran lobby never speaks of these issues. Its silence is damning.

The lobby also never mentions alarming new incidents of militant acts by the Iranian regime every day. Just this weekend, they included:

An Australian naval ship seized a large arms cache that may have come from Iran and headed to Yemen by way of Somalia for Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. On board was more than 2,000 pieces of weaponry — including 1,989 AK-47 assault rifles and 100 rocket-propelled grenades;
The U.S. Commerce Department announced export restrictions on Chinese telecoms equipment maker ZTE Corp for alleged violations of U.S. export controls on Iranian which the Chinese company sold U.S. made telecommunications products to Iran, which is banned;
Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization, disclosed that certain agreements reached under the Iran nuclear deal limit inspectors from publicly reporting on potential violations by the regime. Amano’s remarks come on the heels of a February IAEA oversight report that omitted many details and figures related to Iran’s nuclear program. The report sparked questions from outside nuclear experts and accusations from critics that the IAEA was not being transparent with its findings; and
The FBI arrested the American head of a metallurgy company on charges of illegally exporting to Iran a half-ton of special powder that could, in theory, be used in the production of nuclear-tipped rockets. Agents nabbed 44-year-old Erdal Kuyumcu of Woodside, New York—the CEO of Global Metallurgy, a self-described “provider of specialty metal products, services and supply chain solutions” that lists phone numbers in New York City and Turkey. That Iranian government agencies or companies were allegedly trying to get their hands on cobalt-nickel powder might seem to indicate that Tehran, despite having agreed to suspend its nuclear program, is still trying to develop ballistic missiles optimized for carrying an atomic warhead.

Of course, the Iran lobby has chosen not to defend any of these actions, nor make mention of the continued aggressive moves by the regime, which makes it all too clear what their real motives are: protecting the new “moderate” image of the mullahs.

By Michael Tomlinson

Pushback Grows Against Iran Lobby Claims of Moderate Win

March 4, 2016 by admin

Pushback Grows Against Iran Lobby Claims of Moderate Win

Basking in the afterglow of the Iranian regime’s parliamentary election results, the Iran lobby predictably boasted of the massive wins by moderate and reformist forces within Iran, but now the pushback is coming from a wide variety of the political spectrum as the results and actual winning candidates are absorbed and evaluated.

The realization is settling in that far from the moderate tsunami described by regime supporters such as Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of the National Iranian American Council, the truth is that very little has changed within the regime leadership and the Iranian people still remain firmly in the grip and thrall of the mullahs.

The parade of cold water on the moderate landslide theory was led by the editorial board of the Washington Post, which has intimate first-hand knowledge of the extremist nature of the regime through the hostage taking and eventual prisoner swap of its reporter, Jason Rezaian. It editorialized:

“Claims of a reformist triumph, however, are overblown. Before the elections, an Iranian liberal coalition said that 99 percent of 3,000 pro-reform candidates had been disqualified by a hard-line clerical council. Most of those in Mr. Rouhani’s coalition are, like him, moderate conservatives, meaning they favor economic reforms and greater Western investment, but not liberalization of the political system or a moderation of Iran’s aspiration to become the hegemon of the Middle East. True Iranian religious and political reformers, like those who joined the 2009 Green Movement, are in jail or exile, or were banned from the ballot.

“For now, Iran can be expected to continue the course it has been pursuing in the months since the nuclear deal was struck: waging proxy wars against the United States and its allies around the Middle East, using its unfrozen reserves to buy weapons, and defying non-nuclear limits — such as by testing long-range missiles. The elections won’t make the regime more pliable, and they won’t change the need for a U.S. counter to its aggressions. They shouldn’t provide an excuse for the Obama administration to tolerate Tehran’s provocations,” the Post said.

The Post is correct in its assertions and admits to the basic problem facing those nervously praising the “moderate” wins: they are left with hoping for the best outcome even though it will most likely come to pass since the alternative is to face the difficult choices of pushing for regime change against a regime firmly entrenched.

The Atlantic’s Kathy Gilsinan noted some of the difficulties in the tea leaf reading going on post-election in discerning who actually won.

“Institutions whose members aren’t popularly elected, including the office of the supreme leader, the Guardian Council, the judiciary, and the security services, are the most powerful in Iran’s government. And they remain in the hands of hardliners,” she writes.

“Another reason it’s difficult to know the significance of these elections—aside from the dueling claims of victory from each camp, and the fact that, as Thomas Erdbink of The New York Times reported Wednesday, ‘there has been no official comment on the affiliation of the winning candidates’—is that Iran does not have strong political parties. Knowing that Republicans have a majority in the U.S. Congress, for example, gives you a rough sense of that body’s legislative priorities and how they would differ from those of a Democratic Congress. As Majlis Monitor, a website devoted to Iranian politics, notes, ‘While political parties help us see a country’s political fault-lines, their absence in Iran makes it difficult to understand how politics are actually [organized] and work there.’”

This points out the fundamental problem with the claims being made by Parsi or Jim Lobe over at Lobelog that moderates won the election: the absence of political parties stems from the mullahs aim to eliminate all dissent and organize the government around homogenous support for the Islamic revolution. True dissident parties such as the Mojahedin Khalgh (MEK or PMOI) were outlawed and membership was classified as punishable by death.

There is no doubt that the Iranian people want real reform and a true turn towards democracy. They are tired of living in an oppressive regime where their every online move is monitored and their every economic move is stymied by widespread official corruption.

The New York Times’ Erdbink also explained how results of the election may never be publicly revealed.

“The Interior Ministry, which is overseeing the voting for the 290-seat Parliament and the clerical Assembly of Experts, announced on Tuesday the names of 222 parliamentary candidates who won nationwide. It also announced that there would be a second round of voting for 68 seats in several constituencies in April,” he said. “But there has been no official comment on the affiliation of the winning candidates, and there may never be, making it difficult to determine how many seats the various factions have won.”

The Interior Ministry also oversees the internal security for the regime and already has a checkered history with the hijacking of the 2009 elections. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to see some similar shenanigans with these results to ensure the right kinds of “moderates” eventually won seats.

Former UN ambassador John R. Bolton took a similar viewpoint in writing for the American Enterprise Institute:

“Efforts to distinguish Tehran’s moderates from hard-liners have a long historical record of failure, as have similar precedents in analyzing Moscow and Beijing. Today in Iran, while there are disagreements over economic, social and religious policies among the elite, there is no disagreement over the objective of mastering the difficult science and technology required to achieve nuclear weapons deliverable on ballistic missiles. There is simply no credible evidence that the ayatollahs and other key Iranian leaders have ever diverged on that goal. Moreover, the nuclear and ballistic missile programs are firmly controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, which is about as likely to cede responsibility to the elected Majlis as to America’s Congress,” he writes.

Ultimately the real test of real reform will come if Evin Prison is emptied, ballistic missiles are shelved and support is withdrawn from Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

I wouldn’t hold your breath for that.

By Michael Tomlinson

Kickoff of Campaigning in Iran Hides Suppression of Human Rights

February 19, 2016 by admin

Kickoff of Campaigning in Iran Hides Suppression of Human Rights

The campaign season has kicked off and we’re not talking about the U.S. presidential campaign. In Iran the official campaign period for parliamentary elections for slates of candidates that passed ideological muster.

For most people living in democracies, the Iranian regime’s election system can be nothing short of baffling. It’s a system that begins and ends with a focus on ideological and religious purity and adherence to the Islamic revolutionary ideals it was founded on.

It is also a peculiar system in which the process of reviewing, vetting and examining candidates takes seven weeks to process, but the actual campaign season lasts just seven days.

Of the 12,000 candidates who were submitted for consideration to run for parliamentary seats and positions on the Assembly of Experts, nearly half of them were eliminated from the ballot by the Guardian Council, which is comprised of six mullahs and six law experts all appointed directly and indirectly by top mullah Ali Khamenei. The mere fact that the regime is empowered to eliminate any candidate it deems unfit to run virtually pre-ordains any election outcome in the regime’s favor.

In the case of the Assembly of Experts, of the 800 that applied, only 161 – all men – were approved by the Guardian Council; a miniscule 20 percent.

It’s also noteworthy that in Iran, there are over 250 registered political parties, but virtually none of them represent any true opposition groups such as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a long-time resistance group which is outlawed and the regime vigorously pursues any of its members. The last two main reform-minded political parties were officially banned after the election fiasco of 2009 which resulted in massive protests that were violently put down.

Because of the complete control the regime has over political parties and the ballot, one would think that would be enough to guarantee any election, but in Iran, all ballots are also counted manually and subject to all kinds of shenanigans just in case any candidate who won a seat had a sudden change of heart and wished to oppose the mullahs.

The parliament often serves simply as a rubber stamp for Khamenei’s policies since it lacks the constitutional power to oppose foreign policy, military or other matters of state security. The approval of the nuclear deal is an example of that kind of blank check for Khamenei and his puppet, Hassan Rouhani.

According to Agence France-Presse, “the nuclear deal has partly ended Iran’s isolation but it has been followed by warnings from Khamenei that the military must guard against economic and cultural ‘infiltration’ by foreign actors who aim to damage the Islamic republic’s revolutionary principles.”

“Although parliamentarians backed Rouhani on the nuclear deal they did so less out of a sense of support for the president than because Khamenei made it clear he wanted sanctions lifted,” said AFP.

The closed nature of the regime electoral process allows the Iran lobby a certain flexibility to portray it in a more flattering light; not in the sense that’s at all fair, but rather in portraying certain candidates as “moderates” when in fact very few who pass vetting would be considered a true moderate, let alone a dissident reformist.

An example of that kind of PR spin control comes from the Iran lobby supporters such as the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) which has consistently pushed the idea that the elections would shine a light on growing moderate forces as a result of the nuclear deal.

But the crackdown on dissidents in advance of the elections, wiping off the ballot any conceivable opposition candidates, including the elimination of virtually all women candidates have forced even reliably supportive blogs such as Lobelog.com to print some guest columns describing the elections as “fixed.”

“In order to pass through the punishing vetting process and stand for election, Iranian citizens must comply with a huge set of restrictive criteria, including holding a masters’ degree, adhering to Islam, showing loyalty to the Constitution and the Supreme Leader, and having a spotless political (and mostly spotless criminal) record,” wrote Small Media, a London-based digital advocacy group, in a guest column.

“As evidenced by all the available data, these upcoming elections have been very tightly managed by Iran’s conservative establishment, with the Guardian Council weeding out more than half of the country’s hopeful parliamentary candidates during the vetting process,” Small Media added in what was the closest thing to a criticism of the Iranian regime Lobelog.com has published in a long time.

The fact that there is no real opposition to the mullahs allowed and the discussion of moderate elements within regime politics is mainly for international media consumption, it’s pretty obvious why there is so much concern in various capitals over what the mullahs plan on doing after elections when they will wave a so-called “election mandate” to continue their extremist policies.

This is why the results of the upcoming U.S. elections will likely have far more impact on what happens to the regime since the Obama administration has made clear its desire to appease the mullahs at every turn.

The latest example was the recent announcement of an $8 billion agreement by the Iranian regime to buy advanced military hardware from Russia, including the co-production of Su-30 fighter jets which now appear to be in violation of United Nations sanctions imposed as part of the nuclear deal banning the developing of nuclear-capable delivery systems such as bombers and missiles.

“The U.N. resolution to endorse the flawed Iran nuclear deal actually gives the United States and other members of the Security Council the power to review and legally block arms sales by Russia or other actors to Iran,” Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), a critic of the nuclear accord, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But as Russia and Iran further escalate their use of indiscriminate military force in the Middle East, the administration appears wholly unwilling to use this power.”

According to the terms of the U.N. resolution governing the nuclear agreement, the U.S. and other Security Council members are provided with the power to approve “in advance on a case-by-case basis” most conventional arms sales to Iran.

The statute specifically applies to the “supply, sale, or transfer” to Iran of many conventional arms, including “battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles, or missile systems,” according to the resolution.

It seems that not only are regime elections fixed, but it seems UN sanctions are rigged as well.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Sympathizers Downplay Paris Attacks

November 24, 2015 by admin

Iran Regime Sympathizers Downplay Paris Attacks

In what has to be one of more astounding editorials written about the Paris attacks, Paul R. Pillar, a frequent supporter of the Iranian regime, penned a piece in the National Interest in which he actually tried to make the argument that the attacks were an example of “amateurish” tactics and that the outsized response from governments and media bordered on hysteria and ISIS did not warrant much respect.

“It is a mistake to regard the ISIS entity as a font of critical skills needed to kill people,” Pillar writes.

Let’s think about that statement for a moment. Pillar actually makes the claim that ISIS lacks the skills to kill people. That absurd statement ranks right up there with his previous editorials arguing vociferously for the nuclear agreement with the Iranian regime and his claims that doing so would usher in a new and peaceful phase in Middle East tensions.

Well, we certainly know how that worked out.

Pillar’s piece was reprinted faithfully in Lobelog.com, another loyal member of the Iran lobbying effort alongside the National Iranian American Council and Ploughshares Fund just to name a few; all of whom have recently made efforts to divert attention away from the bloody carnage in Paris and now Mali, and instead try to shift the discussion onto discrimination of Syrian refugees or warning of an overreaction in cracking down on civil liberties.

All of the members of the Iran lobby neglect to mention that the center and source of all of these problems starts and ends with the Iranian regime’s fanatical support of the Assad regime in Syria which started the conflict in the first place and helped spawn ISIS in the sectarian fight that sprang up when the mullahs in Tehran sent in thousands of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, Shiite Militias from Iraq and mercenaries from Afghanistan added to milliards of dollars to help keep its proxy in power in Syria.

The fact that Pillar attempts to gloss over the planning and execution necessary for the Paris attacks is unfathomable, other than he is trying hard to minimize the import of what the attacks mean for the West. He argues:

“Some organizational aptitude was needed to put together an operation that involved simultaneous dispatch of multiple attack teams, but this did not require organizing any more people than would be needed to put together a neighborhood soccer team,” Pillar said.

Most rational people would not think their local neighborhood soccer team could build eight suicide bomb vests, acquire and equip three teams with automatic weapons, arrange timetables, scout locations, determine how to funnel panicked people fleeing a bombed sports stadium into a kill zone and communicate via text messaging on disposable cell phones while arranging the attack via encrypted communications evading virtually all national intelligence agencies.

But Pillar exhibits the singular trait that afflicts all supporters of the Iranian regime; the desire to absolve it of any responsibility for spreading and fostering the kind of extremist Islamic belief that is now shaking the world with widespread, multiple and frequent attacks.

Pillar also neglects to mention another key facet of these attacks that is significantly more disturbing than the actual loss of human life; it’s the fact these attacks are not supported with any public demands.

There are no calls to release political prisoners or comrades. No demands for ransom or payments. No negotiations over territorial claims or grievances.

These attacks are based solely on the nihilistic extremist beliefs that also power and drive the mullahs in Tehran.

“The death toll for all of the Paris attacks, as shocking as it understandably was, nonetheless was much less than a more skillfully conducted operation involving a comparable number of attackers would have inflicted,” Pillar writes. “The attack team that went after the most target-rich location—a sports arena with tens of thousands of people—managed to kill only one other person besides themselves.”

I’m sure the families of those slain would disagree with Pillar on the skill level involved in murdering their loved ones, but his comments reflect the almost callous disregard the Iran lobby has for human suffering. Very similar to the Iranian regime’s initial condemnation of the attack but its consequent show of happiness by shamefully putting the blame on the French authorities in its state wide papers and media.

At key points in the travesty that is the human rights record of the Iranian regime, Pillar and his cohorts including Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of NIAC, Jim Lobe of Lobelog.com and others have been struck deaf and mute when it comes to protesting the abhorrent human rights abuses of the mullahs in Tehran either in their comments to news media or in their own social media posts.

Americans held hostage, journalists rounded up, religious minorities imprisoned, social media administrators tossed in jail, dissidents executed, all these actions and more and warranted hardly a murmur of protest and yet Pillar deigns to call terror attacks in Paris as “amateurish.”

The only real amateurish act in this tragedy is the effort by the Iran lobby to whitewash the blood off the streets of Paris.

By Michael Tomlinson

Apologizing for Iran Regime is a Full-Time Job

June 23, 2015 by admin

In our politically-correct, social-media driven society, many smart people have taken to complaining over the use of the public apology for almost every conceivable slight; perceived or otherwise.

In the arena of politics and diplomacy though, the art of apologizing sometime reaches historic proportions with a refinement worthy of a well-aged wine. Often times a political or diplomatic apology takes the form of the “non-apology apology” which is when a politician will often not apologize for a given action or policy, but apologize instead for the perceived distress such action causes.

It usually includes phrases such as “I’m sorry you feel that way” and “to anyone who may be offended” and is a calculated effort to demonstrate compassion and empathy when in fact there is none. For those who have long defended the Iran regime, it is a veritable way of life.

Apologists such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, Jim Lobe of Lobelog, Bijan Khajehpour of Atieh International and Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, have been loud and vocal supporters of the Iran regime and have taken great pains to excuse its actions; even its most barbarous and callous acts.

Parsi for example has historically apologized for Iran’s human rights violations such as the holding of American hostages on trumped up charges with no open trials as being evidence of a political schism amongst moderate and hardline factions within the regime’s ranks.

Fitzpatrick has also made excuses for Iran’s foreign policy adventures and proxy wars in places such as Syria and Yemen as potentially stabilizing actions, rather than the chaotic acts they actually are. Not to mention that mullahs in Iran are indeed the source of the chaos in most cases.

In each case, the Iran lobby’s apologists have gone out of their way to come up with every possible answer explaining the regime’s actions except the obvious, most logical and correct one which is Iran’s mullahs are firmly set on pursuing a course of action that solidifies their grip on power and expands their extremist ideology.

Sohrab Ahmari, an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, has exhaustively written in Commentary Magazine of the deep and incontrovertible connections between the regime and the wide range of apologists covering for Iran’s mullahs, including Parsi.

“Parsi holds views that have surely warmed the ayatollahs’ hearts. An Iranian-born Swedish citizen, Parsi had made a name with his 2008 book Treacherous Alliance. The book’s basic claim was that the conflict between Khomeinist Iran and the U.S. and Israel was primarily a matter of Tehran’s seeking strategic respect in the region and not, as Jerusalem insisted, on anti-Semitic ideology,” Ahmari writes.

“His argument elided the many ways in which the regime had actually attempted to back its ideological proclamations with action. It also invited readers in effect to excuse the regime’s ugly rhetoric as the lashing out of a rising power,” he added.

The failure of constant apologizing for the regime is that it eventually does nothing to cover up the actions the regime takes and rings hollow to anyone with a brain.

As Tyron Edwards, an American theologian best known for a book of quotations called “A Dictionary of Thoughts,” wrote in the 19^th century: “Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past.”

What he wrote over 170 years ago still applies today. Actions and not words are the best guide to future behavior and the Iran regime has exhibited plenty of actions which are the only real ruler nuclear negotiators in Switzerland should go by.

By Michael Tomlinson