Democrats are being forced to play defense on President Biden’s controversial deal to free up $6 billion in Iranian assets in exchange for the release of five American prisoners, which Republicans are now demanding be reversed after terror attacks by Hamas.
Many Senate Democrats were caught off guard when outlines of the prisoner exchange deal emerged in August, while the Senate was out of session.
Now they are scrambling to determine whether the $6 billion in Iranian funds, frozen in South Korea, can be held up pending an investigation into what involvement Iran had in supporting or greenlighting the attacks on Israeli civilians over the weekend.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who is up for reelection in Montana, a state that twice voted for former President Trump, called on the Biden administration “at a minimum” to freeze the $6 billion in Iranian assets.
“As American intelligence officials continue to investigate the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas, we should review our options to hold Iran accountable for any support they may have provided,” he said. “At a minimum, we should immediately freeze the $6 billion in Iranian assets and explore other financial tools we have at our disposal.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), another Democrat facing a tough reelection race next year, also called for the transfer of Iranian funds to be halted.
“I wasn’t supportive of the initial $6 billion transfer. We should absolutely freeze Iranian assets while we also consider additional statements,” he said Tuesday afternoon.
Manchin released a statement earlier Tuesday calling for harsh sanctions on any country or government linked to the attacks against Israeli civilians.
“Any country or government that is found to be supportive of this terrorist organization should have the most severe sanctions imposed upon them immediately to shut down the support of these terroristic, barbaric actions,” he said.
A Senate Democratic aide in another office said staff members are trying to get answers from the administration about whether the money can be held up and other possible ways to exert leverage over Iran.
“Can we call on the money to be refrozen?” the source asked. “In some ways, we have really limited ability to freeze it up.”
The Democratic aide suggested putting pressure on Western allies to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to the attack.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and members of a bipartisan delegation traveling to China and South Korea met with a group of ambassadors from allied nations at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Beijing on Tuesday to urge allies to do everything they can to stand in solidarity with Israel.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is pushing back on Republican claims that the money released to Iran will help Hamas, which is funded by Iran. He has emphasized none of the money from the frozen account has been spent, and that it may only be used for humanitarian assistance under close supervision by the Treasury Department.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow specializing in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said the political optics of the prisoner exchange aren’t good for the Biden administration but questioned whether anything can be done about it now.
“That $6 billion deal looks worse and worse,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s possible to get it back.”
O’Hanlon said the Biden administration would be wise to try to step up pressure on Iran in response to attacks on Israeli civilians, depending on what further investigations into those attacks uncover.
“At a minimum, though, I’d try to put additional pressure on Iran — once the intelligence is sorted out about its role in this tragedy,” he said.
Senate Republicans are calling for an investigation into Biden’s deal and GOP lawmakers in both chambers are ramping up pressure on the administration to stop the $6 billion from flowing to Iran.
Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the top-ranking Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, said Tuesday that he will press Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to invite Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to appear before the panel to testify about the transfer of funds.
“The Senate should also investigate what led the Biden administration to allow a transfer of $6 billion to Iran and how it could expect Iran to not use that money to continue to fuel terrorism. The American people and Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East, deserve transparency and answers,” said Scott, who is running for president, in a statement.
Brown, who faces a tough reelection in Ohio, said Tuesday that he is speaking with colleagues, the administration, the Israeli government and the Jewish community in Ohio, and he’s “looking at every tool available to support Israel and defeat Hamas.”
He did not make any mention of the $6 billion being released to Iran.
The Washington Post, citing Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials, reported Tuesday that Hamas militants started planning the assault at least a year ago and received support from Iranian allies who provided training, logistical help and tens of millions of dollars in weapons.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and 19 other Senate Republicans sent a letter to Biden on Tuesday demanding that he freeze the money set to flow to Iran.
“To stand by and allow Iran access to these funds as Hamas infiltrates Israel and murders, rapes and mutilates countless Israelis is unconscionable,” they wrote.
The senators argued that even if the funds are restricted for humanitarian purposes, “there is significant risk they could be used to further efforts by Iran or Hamas against Israel.”
Blinken addressed this criticism during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press”
“Iran has, unfortunately, always used and focused its funds on supporting terrorism, on supporting groups like Hamas. And it’s done that when there have been sanctions. It’s done that when there haven’t been sanctions. And it’s always prioritized that,” he said.
He emphasized that the funds in question “have always been, under the law, available to Iran to use for humanitarian purposes” before being frozen in South Korea.
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No comments on Attempting to defend the indefensible
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President Biden gave a speech yesterday saying that Americans were killed and are being held hostage by Hamas.
Jake Smith tells you what Biden didn’t say:
The Biden administration has made several concessions toward Iran, a country that likely backed Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel on Saturday.
Hamas, an Iranian-backed terrorist organization, launched attacks against Israel on Saturday that killed hundreds of Israelis and at least nine Americans. The Biden administration has historically taken a conciliatory approach when dealing with Iran, such as shelling out a $6 billion “ransom” payment and failing to enforce oil sanctions, as well as allowing a number of individuals secretly working on Iran’s behalf to operate inside the government.
“The theory that if the West restrains, then Iran will restrain, has fallen flat once again,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior researcher on Iranian security and political issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the face of over 2-plus years of unenforced oil sanctions [and] allowing Tehran the potential to earn far more than 6 billion dollars, Iran has continued supporting proxies and partners with the overall aim of sharpening the knife it has pre-positioned at the neck of Israel.”
One example of Biden’s allowances toward Iran has been taking a softer stance on enforcing oil sanctions than previous administrations. Iranian oil exports have reached almost 2 million barrels a day, a sharp contrast to the limited 400,000 barrels exported a day in 2020 under former President Donald Trump.
Homeland Security Investigations have not seized an Iranian oil shipment in over a year, despite the fact that the organization’s prime responsibility is sanctions enforcement. Bipartisan lawmakers have criticized the Biden administration for its “lack of action” and intentional ignorance toward Iranian sanctions violations.
The Biden administration continued to ease off sanctions enforcement following the recent completion of a deal in which $6 billion in assets was unfrozen and granted to Iran in exchange for five American prisoners, in what has been derided by critics as a “ransom” payment. Though the administration insists that the $6 billion can only be used for humanitarian purposes, it also frees up unrestricted funds Iran already had in its reserves, allowing them to fund terrorist operations by Hamas or Hezbollah, experts told the DCNF.
Additionally, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stated in September that Tehran has the “authority” to use the $6 billion “wherever [they] need it,” despite previous assurances from the White House. The payout is likely only to embolden Iran to take more hostages in the hopes of another payout, experts previously told the DCNF; Hamas has already captured hundreds of Israelis in their attacks that began Saturday.
The Biden administration has likely made such concessions to get Iran back to the negotiating table on the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) – informally known as the Iran nuclear deal – that was signed in 2015 by the Obama administration, according to experts who previously spoke to the DCNF. The deal was scrapped in 2018 by former President Donald Trump for containing too many exemptions, and severe economic sanctions were put in place instead.
The Biden administration started working to return Iran to the deal in 2021, but Iranian leadership has been largely disinterested and refused multiple proposals, leading the administration to come up with new offers that ease some of the harsher aspects of the deal and waives certain sanctions. No deal offered has been accepted by Iran, and it now has enough enriched uranium to build ten nuclear weapons in the course of four months.
“It’s also clear from Biden’s shifting redlines and goals with respect to Iran’s nuclear program – moving from a longer and stronger deal, to clean JCPOA resurrection, to a lesser deal, to merely an informal unwritten understanding – that the administration is looking for as little oversight as possible on the entire process,” Taleblu told the DCNF.
Additionally, a number of members of an influence network known as the Iranian Experts Initiative (IEI) have gained access to U.S. officials, and at least one has held a high-level position in the Pentagon. The IEI was created in 2014 to influence U.S. and European academics to covertly push Tehran’s agenda, either through media appearances, widely publicized op-eds or in government roles.
One such example is Ariane Tabatabai, the current chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations in the Pentagon and a former Iranian diplomat for the Biden administration. After it was discovered that Tabatabai was a member of the IEI, the Pentagon said it would begin investigating how she was hired, but it missed the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) deadline of Oct. 3 and failed to produce updates on the investigation; Tabatabai has not been fired from her role.
Another member of the IEI is Ali Vaez, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group who’s made multiple appearances in Western media and written a number of pieces favorable to Iran. Vaez visited the White House on multiple occasions to meet with high-level Biden administration officials as recently as March, visitor logs reveal.
It’s not clear if the officials Vaez met with were aware of his ties to the IEI, though it’s certainly possible, according to Gabriel Noronha, former special advisor for the State Department.
“In this case, they either ignored that influence, which has been quite evident to many observers and practitioners of Iran policy insiders for years, or they actually were interested in cultivating someone with ties to the regime,” Noronha said about the White House allowing Vaez to visit.
Both Vaez and Tabatbai are close allies to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, who was recently suspended from his role over concerns about his handling of classified information and his ties to Iranian intelligence. Malley was previously fired from former President Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic presidential campaign for facilitating communications with Hamas.
No updates have been given by the State Department on the ongoing investigation into Malley, only that it exists and he is still on unpaid leave. He has not been fired from his role.
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The number one song today in 1975 (and I remember when it was number one) was credited to Neil Sedaka, with a big assist to Elton John, making it arguably Sedaka’s most rock-like song even with flutes:
The number one album today in 1980 was the Police’s “Zenyattà Mondatta”:
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Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the new House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, rallied a bipartisan group of lawmakers, alongside Chinese dissidents and human-rights advocates, in front of the alleged Chinese police station in New York City.
As recently as last fall, the existence of the Chinese government police outpost, run by the city of Fuzhou’s public-security bureau in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was unknown to most Americans. But earlier today, it became the center of a highly attended event in downtown New York where CCP opponents called out the Chinese regime’s totalitarianism.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democratic committee member who represents a district in the Bronx, emphasized the unified message at the center of the rally.
“We’re sending a powerful message that the defense of human rights from the abuses of the CCP is not a Democratic value or a Republican value. It’s an American value,” he said.
“We know that the transnational policing is not actually about the solving of crimes, it’s about the systematic surveillance and suppression of political dissidents,” he later added.
Representatives from a number of Chinese dissident groups — as well as advocates for populations targeted by CCP repression such as Uyghurs, Mongolians, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans — also attended the event. Representative Neal Dunn, another member of the counter-CCP committee, also spoke, pointing out that “the number-one victims of the CCP is the Chinese people.”
The police station’s existence was brought to light by the human-rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders in a report last fall, finding that other such outposts have been involved in harassment and stalking plots targeting Chinese nationals overseas. Since then, the FBI has reportedly searched the facility, and the State Department has said that the police station closed.
Equipping law enforcement to more effectively counter foreign transnational repression schemes of the sort that Chinese overseas police are involved in was a main focus of the event. Over the past year, the Justice Department has brought cases against several individuals implicated in stalking schemes across the U.S., including in New York. In one case, Chinese spies tried to order a car crash to take out Xiong Yan, a former congressional candidate who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Gallagher said that it’s critical that FBI field offices across the country be trained to deal with Chinese transnational repression. In recent years, the bureau has stepped up its investigations of foreign countries’ repression on U.S. soil, setting up a tip page dedicated to such activities.
“It needs to be local police trained on this as well,” Gallagher added. “If a victim is brave enough to come forward, no repressive act orchestrated by a foreign government should ever fall on deaf ears.”
In his remarks at the event, Chinese dissident and Tiananmen Square protest leader Fengsuo Zhou echoed that point, calling the rally “just a starting point.”
“We need more activities like this. We need more victims to speak out,” he said.
The story does not mention that Gallagher is from Green Bay.
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Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present the number one song today in 1960:
The number two single today in 1970 was originally written for a bank commercial:
Britain’s number one album today in 1970 was Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”:
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I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection.
The attack on the festival outside of Re’im began around 7 a.m. The party was at its peak by then—which meant that by then most people were inebriated. At first, partygoers heard a loud explosion, which they took to be another sporadic rocket attack on southern Israel. But then the explosions grew louder and constant, and kept going for about five minutes. The music stopped, and the police protecting the 4,000 or 5,000 ravers began pushing everyone to leave.
By then, the terrorists were approaching in pickup trucks bearing Hamas military markings.
Shooting began. Many were executed on the spot. 260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave.
Many of the young men and women started running in the flat expanse of the western Negev desert. Faced with the spectacle of kids fleeing for their lives on a largely flat surface, the terrorists began rounding up the rest of their victims.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.
One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades.
Some of the lucky ones ran to a nearby wadi, seeking shelter amid the shrubbery. “I felt like they were shooting right above our heads,” one survivor recalled. “I dove into a bush … It felt like the shooting was coming from 180 degrees, all around us. I understood we’re going to be there for at least a couple of hours. And I had nothing on me. And I was like, the only thing I want is a weapon. I want something to protect us.” Eventually, he and his friends, some of them barefoot, decided to risk it and try to reach safety, walking close enough to the road to see it but not so close so that they might be seen. “I said, if we see like army or police cars, we’re going to go to the road. Otherwise, we’re going to stay away. When we saw police and army cars, we knew that it’s a safe place.”
Later, when the gruesome attack was finally over and IDF soldiers managed to subdue the attackers, they searched these trucks and found RPG launchers, high-end communications devices, assorted AK-47s and other mostly Soviet-made weapons, along with numerous copies of the Quran.
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As I watched the videos of the horrific attacks on innocent civilians in Israel and the absolute bloodthirstiness of Hamas, I was reminded of my conversation in Kyiv with Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, and his off-color description of an “Axis of A**holes” operating around the world, attacking the innocent, seeking to destabilize and attack free countries, and conquering territory.
It is not quite true that every one of America’s enemies works together. But they all share interests and often find ways to cooperate when it suits those interests.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed what everyone suspected Sunday — that the beastly men of Hamas pulled the trigger on this massacre of unarmed civilians, but the Iranians trained them, put the weapons in their hands, helped them aim, and gave the order:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Apparently, U.S. news organizations can get senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah to confirm things that our intelligence community cannot confirm. Or perhaps members of the Biden administration don’t want to admit that the U.S. intelligence community is confirming these statements.
It is difficult not to notice that the Biden team will quickly believe the worst about its Republican opponents, but, at least in the first 48 hours of this crisis, the administration bent over backward to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt. As if Hamas was going to plan the biggest, most deadly, and most audacious attack on Israel in its history without Iran having any hand in it at all.
Since the moment Biden took office, he and his team have been hell-bent on resuscitating the Iran nuclear deal, and have held to their fervent belief that the U.S. can somehow have a stable and productive relationship with a country whose parliament regularly chants “death to America.” The Iranian regime cannot state its beliefs any clearer, and our leaders keep insisting, “Oh, you don’t really mean that. You seem reasonable, and I’m sure we can work this out.”
With attitudes like this on display, you might think that some of the people advising the Biden administration on its Iran policies were working for the Iranian government. Actually, two of them were.
The administration had a happy narrative of success that was a casualty of Hamas’s attacks this weekend. “What we said was, we want to depressurize, deescalate, and ultimately integrate the Middle East region. . . . The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said at The Atlantic Festival on September 29.
Look closely enough, and you can find ties between almost all our foreign-policy problems and threats.
Hamas is a subsidiary of Iran. Back in 2019, the U.S. State Department calculated that the Iranian government sends $700 million annually to terrorist groups including Hamas; earlier this year, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant estimated that Iran sends Hamas $100 million per year. One report indicated that Iranian support for Hamas had ballooned to $360 million per year, or $30 million per month.
At the beginning of the year, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in an interview with Al Jaezzra that Iran paid a total of $70 million to the Palestinian group to help it develop missiles and defense systems. (Note that Qatar gives Hamas $30 million per month in “stipends for families, fuel for electricity, and to help pay public sector wages.” As we will discuss below, any money that you don’t spend on non-weapon expenses frees up money to spend on weapons.)
This weekend, you could find lots of Americans spitting hot fire over the Biden administration’s decision to unfreeze $6 billion in seized Iranian funds as part of a hostage-release deal. A wide-scale attack on Israel like this must have required massive funding and arms. Administration sources and friends insist that money can only be spent on humanitarian purposes, and hand-wave away the counterargument that money is fungible — that if Iran knows it is getting $6 billion for humanitarian expenses, it frees up $6 billion in the budget for more support of terrorism. (The Editors, September 14: “This White House is just an easy mark.”)
But we should remember that Iran gets money from a lot of places beyond unfrozen accounts.
China is Iran’s largest trading partner; by itself, that’s not surprising as it was our largest trading partner for a long stretch until Mexico overtook it last month. But Chinese government policies help keep the Iranian economy afloat and minimize the impact of sanctions. China is importing more and more Iranian oil, sending it through Malaysia. The two countries are expanding their military cooperation, and the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian navies conducted joint drills in the Gulf of Oman in March.
Russia and Iran have never been closer; the Russian war effort runs on Iranian-manufactured drones, which gives Tehran more cash to send to its multiple terrorist groups surrounding Israel. As the European Council on Foreign Relations summarized, “Tehran’s military contribution to Russia’s war effort has made an enormous difference to Russia’s ability to persevere in a difficult conflict. Iran, once a secondary player, is now one of Russia’s most significant collaborators in the war in Ukraine.”
A bunch of those Iranian drones are actually manufactured in Syria. North Korea is sending artillery to Russia to use in Ukraine. China comes to the economic rescue of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela. Serbia, backed by Russia, built up military forces on its border with Kosovo.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes that all over Africa and what we used to call the Third World, “China and Russia are either directly promoting militaries’ returns or helping them consolidate their influence once armed forces have already gained greater power — in other words, pouring fuel on the fire of remilitarization and, in China’s case, definitively trying to create an alternative world order to that led by the United States.”
As I noted after my conversation with Maryan Zablotskiy, the Russian government, its mercenaries, and its allies stir up trouble all over the globe. It’s not just in Ukraine; it’s in Georgia, Moldova, Syria, all over central Asia, the Central African Republic and Sudan, and in the recent coup in Niger.
Oh, and the Taliban in Afghanistan is eager to sell captured U.S. arms to anyone willing to pay. As Foreign Policy magazine laid out in July, “It’s a new arms race — and it’s threatening global security. The Taliban, allies of if not quite affiliates of al Qaeda, are at the center of a global smuggling web that earns billions of dollars from heroin and meth. Now they appear to be funneling small arms to like-minded extremists inspired by their victory.”
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we are witnessing the failure of deterrence; the “rules-based international order” that the Biden team keeps talking about is in tatters. This morning, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt writes, “The world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.”
Hamas rapes and slaughters hundreds of innocent people at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Russia invades Ukraine, and China is preparing for the conquest of Taiwan. No one is afraid of the West anymore; no one expects the arsenal of democracy and our allies to show up, guns blazing, in response to some outrageous provocation or massacre or invasion anymore.
Blame it on the images of the Afghanistan withdrawal, blame it on neo-isolationist attitudes taking root all across the West, blame it on amoral Western financial elites who look at brutal autocracies and see just another way to make a buck. (Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya in January 2022: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)
Maybe blame it on the United States having a geriatric president who attended a barbeque in the Rose Garden for the White House executive staff last night.
Zablotskiy called what we’re facing the “Axis of A**holes.” You may not like that particular term, but we need some label for increasing opportunistic cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, other rogue states such as North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Considering how everyone involved in this malevolent network has the resume of a demon, I’d say the “Axis of the Devils” fits. It’s been a theme in the fiction work the past few years.
Somewhere in the Gaza Strip, there are innocent Palestinians — just ordinary folks, trying to get through the day, make a living, and raise their families. But if you live next door to a Hamas bomb-making hideout or weapons depot, or let terrorists run your territory, you’ve made a choice to live with an extremely high risk of fatal consequences. It’s hard to know if Palestinians could live any other way than they do now — a de facto terrorist state — as they are ruled by terrorists and sometimes terrorized themselves. If there were a Palestinian Martin Luther King, Hamas would have killed him because it doesn’t want competition or a threat to its power.
Years ago during the Cold War, Sting sang, “Do Russians love their children too?” If you raise your children to believe they have no higher calling in life than to be a suicide bomber, I’d argue you don’t love them. A report in March found, “Teachers and schools at the United Nations agency that runs education and social services for Palestinians regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism.”
Think about how many great potential doctors, scientists, businessmen, engineers, architects, and artists the Palestinians have lost because their society told those children the best thing they could do with their lives was blow themselves up and take some Jews with them. Life for the Palestinians could be completely different, and better, than it is now — but for that to happen, they collectively would need to make completely different, and better, choices.
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The Wall Street Journal:
DUBAI—Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.
A spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations said the Islamic Republic stood in support of Gaza’s actions but didn’t direct them.
“The decisions made by the Palestinian resistance are fiercely autonomous and unwaveringly aligned with the legitimate interests of the Palestinian people,” the spokesman said. “We are not involved in Palestine’s response, as it is taken solely by Palestine itself.”
A direct Iranian role would take Tehran’s long-running conflict with Israel out of the shadows, raising the risk of broader conflict in the Middle East. Senior Israeli security officials have pledged to strike at Iran’s leadership if Tehran is found responsible for killing Israelis.
The IRGC’s broader plan is to create a multi-front threat that can strangle Israel from all sides—Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official.
At least 700 Israelis are confirmed dead, and Saturday’s assault has punctured the country’s aura of invincibility and left Israelis questioning how their vaunted security forces could let this happen.
Israel has blamed Iran, saying it is behind the attacks, if indirectly. “We know that there were meetings in Syria and in Lebanon with other leaders of the terror armies that surround Israel so obviously it’s easy to understand that they tried to coordinate. The proxies of Iran in our region, they tried to be coordinated as much as possible with Iran,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said Sunday.
Hamas has publicly acknowledged receiving support from Iran. And on Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi talked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.
Iran has been setting aside other regional conflicts, such as its open feud with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, to devote the IRGC’s foreign resources toward coordinating, financing and arming militias antagonistic to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members said.
The U.S. and Israel have designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
“We are now free to focus on the Zionist entity,” the Iranian official said. “They are now very isolated.”
The strike was intended to hit Israel while it appeared distracted by internal political divisions over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It was also aimed at disrupting accelerating U.S.-brokered talks to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel that Iran saw as threatening, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members said.
Building on peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, expanding Israeli ties with Gulf Arab states could create a chain of American allies linking three key choke points of global trade—the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Bab Al Mandeb connecting the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea, said Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
“That’s very bad news for Iran,” Ibish said. “If they could do this, the strategic map changes dramatically to Iran’s detriment.”
Leading the effort to wrangle Iran’s foreign proxies under a unified command has been Ismail Qaani, the leader of the IRGC’s international military arm, the Quds Force.
Qaani launched coordination among several militias surrounding Israel in April during a meeting in Lebanon, The Wall Street Journal has reported, where Hamas began working more closely with other groups such as Hezbollah for the first time.
Around that time, Palestinian groups staged a rare set of limited strikes on Israel from Lebanon and Gaza, under the direction of Iran, said the Iranian official. “It was a roaring success,” the official said.
Iran has long backed Hamas but, as a Sunni Muslim group, it had been an outsider among Tehran’s Shia proxies until recent months, when cooperation among the groups accelerated.
Representatives of these groups have met with Quds Force leaders at least biweekly in Lebanon since August to discuss this weekend’s attack on Israel and what happens next, they said. Qaani has attended some of those meetings along with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, Islamic Jihad leader al-Nakhalah, and Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s military chief, the militant-group members said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian attended at least two of the meetings, they said.
“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London. “Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”
The Palestinian and Lebanese militias’ ability to coordinate with Iran will be tested in the coming days as Israel’s response comes into focus.
Egypt, which is trying to mediate in the conflict, has warned Israeli officials that a ground invasion into Gaza would trigger a military response from Hezbollah, opening up a second battlefront, people familiar with the matter said. Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire briefly on Sunday.
Hamas has called on Palestinians in the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel to take up arms and join the fight. There have been limited clashes in the West Bank, but no reports of clashes between Arabs and Jews inside Israel, as happened in May 2021 when Israel and Gaza last engaged in extended combat.
The Iranian official said that if Iran were attacked, it would respond with missile strikes on Israel from Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, and send Iranian fighters into Israel from Syria to attack cities in the north and east of Israel.
Iran’s backing of a coordinated group of Arab militias is ominous for Israel. In previous conflicts, the Soviet Union was the ultimate patron of Israel’s Arab enemies and was always able to pressure them to reach some type of accommodation or recognize a red line, said Bernard Hudson, a former counterterrorism chief for the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The Soviets never considered Israel a permanent foe,” he said. “Iran’s leadership clearly does.”
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Today is Columbus Day and/or Indigenous People’s Day. About the latter, Rich Lowry has some history you won’t read today:
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream wants the United States to return the Black Hills to the Lakota.
Which raises the question: Once this transfer takes place, will the Lakota turn around and give the Black Hills back to the tribes they took them from?
It’s never a good idea to get history lessons from an ice-cream maker with a hippy vibe that sold out to a multinational conglomerate long ago, but the Ben & Jerry’s July 4 condemnation of the United States as “founded on stolen Indigenous land” is a common enough hostile interpretation of our past that it’s worth dwelling on.
There is no doubt that our dealings with Native Americans were characterized by brutality, land-hunger, and duplicity, and constitute one of the nation’s foremost sins. The problem with the Ben & Jerry’s view, which is considered a truism on the left, is that it is immune to complexity and rests on an ahistorical, ultimately condescending belief in the inherent innocence and peaceableness of Native Americans.
Consider the Lakota. Like many other tribes we encountered on the Plains, they were relative newcomers to the area, getting pushed westward by intertribal warfare and establishing themselves there by force, as well. Counter to the saccharine romance of such depictions as the famous Kevin Costner movie, Dances with Wolves, Native American society was red in tooth and claw; Native Americans weren’t simplistic archetypes but real people prone to all the usual flaws of human nature including hatred, greed, and violence.
The Ben & Jerry’s July 4 message refers to the Lakota “fighting to keep colonizers off their land,” without any mention of the fact that, just a short time before, they were the colonizers.
As Elliott West notes in his new book Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, the advent of a horse culture among various Native American tribes made the Great Plains and Southwest a killing field of warfare and disease. “Two great coalitions — Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakotas north of the Arkansas River and Comanches and Kiowas south of it — clashed bitterly until making peace in 1840, then both preyed on sedentary peoples on the fringes,” West writes.
Devastating smallpox epidemics, slaughters, and raids and counterraids were dismayingly routine features of these regions long before the United States was a contender for dominance.
According to West, one reason so much Mexican land was there for the taking during the Mexican–American War was it had been depopulated by constant Native American raiding.
Is it too much for Ben & Jerry’s to spare a thought for the Mexicans killed, captured, or dispossessed by merciless Native American warriors?
As for the Lakota, they didn’t take control of territory to the west through gentle persuasion. They gained control of the Black Hills in the late 18th century by expelling the prior occupants. The history here doesn’t neatly line up with the Ben & Jerry’s call for “dismantling white supremacy and systems of oppression and ensuring that Indigenous people can again govern the land their communities called home for thousands of years.”
Which indigenous people? And which lands?
None of this is to minimize the double-dealing that saw the United States take the Black Hills after the discovery of gold, or the demographic catastrophe that befell Native peoples. Europeans unleashed terrible epidemics when they came to these shores, although that wasn’t something they foresaw or intended.
The potted version of the nation’s history favored by the likes of Ben & Jerry’s is meant to delegitimize the United States as such. Not only does it make the country’s expansion a tale of unadulterated malevolence, but it also can’t accommodate the reality of Native American peoples who practiced self-interested, ever-shifting diplomacy with one another and with Europeans, and who constantly warred with one another and Europeans — for land and hunting grounds, for honor and vengeance, and for captives to add to their numbers.
Suffice it to say that — no matter what their latter-day champions might wish — these peoples were not politically correct.
It is as inaccurate as claiming that only whites were responsible for slavery worldwide (which still exists today, by the way).
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My favorite Ray Charles song was number one today in 1961:
Today in 1969, the BBC’s “Top of the Pops” refused for the first time to play that week’s number one song because of what singers Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin were supposedly doing while recording “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus”:
According to a classmate of mine, Madison radio stations play Britain’s number one single today in 1971 too often:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 