Archive for the ‘Iran’ Category

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No Big Deal

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

In Iran, the censorship has been more sophisticated, amounting to an extraordinary cyberduel. It feels at times as if communications within the country are being strained through a sieve, as the government slows down Web access and uses the latest spying technology to pinpoint opponents.

New York Times, June 23, 2009

I voted today, against the recall of Akron mayor Don Plusquellic.

It wasn’t such a big thing. I walked into Grace Lutheran Church, between two small American flags planted into the ground. There was no line. I found my name on a sheaf of papers hanging from the wall by the door, spelled correctly (with both of my middle initials, N and K, a rarity these days), along with my party affiliation: DEM. I found my precinct, 8-R, signed my name in a voting book, then took my ballot in a folder to a nearby privacy table, and neatly filled in the oval registering my preference to keep Plusquellic in office.

“We are having difficulty getting updates to u as so many of our contacts been arrested – life here is v/v/dangerous now”

A reliable Iranian source, writing on Twitter, posted on Huffingtonpost this morning

I slid my ballot into an automated machine, and noticed on the digital window that I was the 105th person to cast my vote in that machine so far today.

“You did your civic duty,” a lovely poll worker named Laura told me. She handed me an “I voted” sticker, with an American flag in a circle. I promptly stuck it on my T-shirt.

There was only one question on the ballot today. For or against the recall. It really wasn’t such a big deal.

“Getting reliable news has become extremely difficult. Most of my sources have been arrested and I think about the few remaining ones and am very worried.”

A reliable Iranian source, writing on Twitter, posted on Huffingtonpost this morning

On my way out, I passed a sign in for pre-K classes. A large poster of a smiling sun on the wall. And a welcome bear blowing a long horn. Inexplicably, on a table in the hallway, a stuffed Pittsburgh Steelers bear sat next to a Pittsburgh Steelers cheerleader bear.

“We voted,” one woman said to another as she passed me, stepped out the door into the sunshine.

I was in and out in less than five minutes. Really, no big deal.

They gathered, the women in black, at Nilofar Square to mourn Neda Agha Soltan, the Iranian student cut down by a single bullet … I sat among the mourners in late afternoon, under the plane trees, as candles burned and a prayer was said …

As the sound of the prayer rose, the regular city police joined in. This was too much for the Basij militia, the regime’s plainclothes shock troops, who arrived on motorbikes and, wielding sticks, broke up the gathering of about 60 people.

Roger Cohen, New York Times, June 23, 2009

When I returned home, I logged on to the “Share Your Experience” voting site, set up by the Voting Rights Institute of Ohio, at www.myvoteohio.com.

I plugged in my name, address, and email. Near the bottom, there is a scroll down list of potential problems I might have encountered, including: “voter intimidation,” “improper behavior by a pollworker,” “disability access problem,” and “problem related to non-English language assistance.”

Seeing no listing for “Pittsburgh Steelers bear on table outside voting booth,” I noted only that I had a pleasant experience, and that Laura had helped me vote. I submitted the comment with a click.

Somewhere today, my vote will be tallied, along with all the rest of them. I have every faith that the counting will be fair and honest. By tonight, the voters will have spoken. Plusquellic will either be recalled, or he won’t be.

Honestly, it’s no big deal.

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The Blinders of Obama’s Critics

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

When I saw this morning that William Bennett, of all people, has joined the growing chorus criticizing President Obama on Iran, it put me over the edge.

Coming as it did on top of John McCain’s criticism on Face the Nation Sunday, which added to a week’s worth of complaint, much of it coming from Republicans and right-wing blowhards.

“He is the President of the United States,” Bennett said on CNN. ”If he will not side with these young people against a religious autocracy that is beating the hell out of people, what is the point of being the moral leader of the free world?”

Hm. That’s interesting.

Let’s remember, these critics are the same people who, during the election campaign, harshly condemned Obama’s position that he would end the Bush policy of isolating Iran, and, instead, open direct talks.

Here is what William Bennett said, writing with Seth Leibsohn in the National Review in June:

Barack Obama’s stance toward Iran is as troubling as it is dangerous. By stating and maintaining that he would negotiate with Iran, ‘without preconditions,’ and within his first year of office, he will give credibility to, and reward for his intransigence, the head of state of the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. Such a meeting will also undermine and send the exact wrong signal to Iranian dissidents.

Wow, Bill. You nailed that one on the head.

Bush labeled Iran part of the Axis of Evil. His war toppled Saddam Hussein, immeasurably strengthening Iran’s hand. Under his administration, American diplomats worldwide were prohibited from dealing with their Iranian peers.

“The result,” Helene Cooper wrote in the NY Times’ Week in Review yesterday, ”according to many experts here and in Iran, was that Iranians, including reformers, swallowed their criticism of the hard-line regime and united against the common enemy. Iranians with reformist sympathies even began advising Americans to stop openly supporting them, lest that open them to attack as pawns of America.”

But don’t take Helene’s word for it.

Here’s Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who knows a bit more about Iran than Bill Bennett:

“Behind closed doors, most Iranian officials have long recognized that the ‘death to America’ culture of 1979 is bankrupt, and that Iran will never achieve its enormous potential as long as relations with the United States remain adversarial,” he told Cooper. “If Tehran’s hardliners are incapable of making nice with an American president named Barack Hussein Obama who preaches mutual respect and wishes them a happy Nowruz, it’s pretty obvious the problem is in Tehran, not Washington.”

Against the advice of just about every conservative voice, including Bill Bennett’s, Obama came to office promising direct talks with Iran, without preconditions. Once in office, he videotaped a new year’s message to the Iranian people and leaders, referring to Iran as the “Islamic Republic,” and quoting a Persian poet who died seven centuries ago. He removed the ban on U.S. diplomats dealing with their Iranian peers worldwide. And, as Cooper points out, in Cairo, he took the unprecedented step of taking responsibility for the U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government.

All of which sent a crucial message to those inside Iran who are now taking to the streets en masse.

But don’t take my word for it.

“Afshin Molavi,” Cooper writes, ”an Iran expert at the New America Foundation, said that the vast majority of Iranians today want better relations with the United States, and middle-class Iranians in particular, he said, were hoping that the Iranian regime would capitalize on Mr. Obama’s much talked about unclenched fist.

“Even though Mr. Moussavi shared the leadership’s commitment to Iran’s nuclear program, many middle-class Iranians believed that he would be better able than Mr. Ahmadinejad to strike a warmer relationship with Mr. Obama, said Mr. Molavi, author of ‘Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran’ (Norton). ‘When the election results were announced, for the Iranian middle class, it was not only an insult and an injustice, but it dashed their hopes for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement and told them that they would continue to be isolated in the world.’”

Yet Bennett, in his infinite wisdom, has the audacity to go on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday and say this of Obama’s Iran response: “He needs to say it in no uncertain terms. This is very disappointing, as far as I’m concerned. This was the president to whom the whole world was looking. . . . This is a president about hope, he’s about the future. This is a guy who was a community organizer. He missed it. He missed the opportunity.”

How thick are the blinders?

How do I put this in simply? Obama’s smug critics have already been proven wrong. When Bill Bennett wrote in the National Review one year ago, “Barack Obama’s position on negotiating with U.S. enemies betrays a profound misreading of history,” it was Bennett who was misreading history. The moment was ripe for rapprochement, and Obama seized it.

President Obama did not spur this revolution, and he has taken great pains not to be perceived as fomenting it. But, as a conservative friend of mine — also critical of Obama’s response — admitted in an email the other day: “In the end, much of this has to do with Obama. The protests would not have happened without Obama.”

It is because of President Obama that this opportunity exists.

It’s high time for his right wing critics to recognize this. To recognize that the hard-line, warmongering approach of their standard bearer helped create this mess in the first place. And to give this president who has already shown such good judgment and instincts in opening the door to Iran – at great political risk – the benefit of the doubt, instead of relentlessly piling on.

I daresay, a scant few months into this new administration, doing so would even be patriotic.

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Mother’s Day in Iran

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

I read a lot today about the fast-moving situation in Iran. Nothing more moving than Roger Cohen’s column in the New York Times.

“Iran’s women stand in the vanguard,” he wrote …

For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

It’s hard not to feel chills when you read stuff like this.

“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”

It’s crazy that in this day and age, there really is nothing we can do to help. No place to send a donation. No one to lobby with a letter-writing campaign. No business to boycott.

“Just off Revolution Street,” Cohen writes, ”I walked into a pall of tear gas …

I’d lit a cigarette minutes before — not a habit but a need — and a young man collapsed into me shouting, “Blow smoke in my face.” Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, “We are with you” in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end — Tehran is full of them — running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging.

There were about 20 of us gathered there, eyes running, hearts racing. A 19-year-old student was nursing his left leg, struck by a militiaman with an electric-shock-delivering baton. “No way we are turning back,” said a friend of his as he massaged that wounded leg.

We are with you.

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‘A Misguided Majority’

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

As I read Huffington Post’s live blogging of the violent crackdown going on at this hour against freedom-fighters in Tehran, I’m struck by a parallel to this week’s Torah portion.

Here, for instance, is a report from a BBC reporter:

Security forces were everywhere in central Tehran in the late afternoon and early evening.

As I spent a couple of hours driving around in heavy traffic I could see thousands of men, some uniformed members of the military riot squads, some units of revolutionary guard, and everywhere basijis – militiamen who look like street toughs.

The security men were deployed on every street corner, in long lines down the sides of the roads, and in all the main squares.

The basijis wore riot helmets and carried big clubs. It was designed to intimidate, and while I was there, it was working.

And here is a report from one of the blogger’s contacts in Iran:

You couldn’t imagin what I saw tonight, I walked down many streets(Vali asr, keshavars, amir abad, Fatemi, Shademan, Satarkhan, Khosro), and I was injured by tears gas, but the main thing : The big killer group, called “Basij”, weared our special military service group -”Sepah”- dresses and they were all armed , I saw by myself one of them had only around 15 years old!!!! and he had the shot order! I saw a girl injured by gon shot (in Amir abad St.)! and there weren’t enough ambulances . I walked through Shademan St. they start shooting , a young boy in front of my eyes murdered , and 3 other people were injured , there were also a big fight between people and Basij at Tohid Sq. 7 people was murdered there, I walked from my company to my home , It was taken 4 hours and I couldn’t be able to make a video , cause I was in the middle of war!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This week’s parsha is Sh’lah L’kha, from the Book of Numbers. It’s the story of the Israeli spies, one from each of the 12 tribes, who go out to scout the Promised Land. Ten return with stories about how the occupants of the land are powerful and numerous, striking fear into the hearts of the Israelites, causing them to doubt God. Only two — Caleb and Joshua — stand against the ten.

“Have no fear then of the people of the country,” Joshua says.

Here’s the midrashic interpretation:

“Joshua and Caleb risk their lives by acting with integrity and standing up to a misguided majority. In the end, it is the majority who will die in the wilderness and the people of integrity and courage who will survive to see their dreams realized.”

Let this ancient story serve as fair warning to Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and their band of violent thugs.

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‘The Administration Has It Exactly Right’

Friday, June 19th, 2009

I don’t often find myself rushing to quote NY Times columnist David Brooks. He’s conservative, he supported McCain in the election, and he’s a regular critic of President Obama.

All of which makes it even more noteworthy that in his column this morning, he applauded Obama for the administration’s response to the uprising in Iran.

Yes, Obama has been legalistic, supporting the protestors while recognizing Iran’s sovereignty, and therefore short on sincerity and heart.

But as Brooks writes: “When you don’t know what’s happening, it’s sensible to do as little as possible because anything you do might cause more harm than good.”

What’s important is that the Obama administration understands the scope of what is happening. And on the big issue, my understanding is that the administration has it exactly right.

The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core … From now on, the central issue of Iran-Western relations won’t be the nuclear program. The regime is more fragile than the program. The regime is more likely to go away than the program.

As the AP notes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who warned ominously today that his regime will crack down on protestors, has already sought to use Obama’s words to paint this as an American-fomented uprising.

“Khamenei reacted strongly,” The AP writes, ”saying Obama’s statements contradicted the president’s stated goal of opening dialogue with Iran and the conciliatory tone of other recent American messages.”

“The U.S. president said ‘We were waiting for a day like this to see people on the street,’” Khamenei said. “They write to us and say they respect the Islamic Republic and then they make comments like this. … Which one should we believe?”

There are things Obama can do, Brooks writes, to help hasten the fall of the regime, including economic and cultural sanctions, presidential visits to the United States for key dissidents, and “the unapologetic condemnation of the regime’s barbarities.”

Unfortunately, it looks like our president may have ample opportunity to employ the latter in the days to come.

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‘A Nation of People’

Friday, June 19th, 2009

How does the uprising in Iran look from my perspective, as a Jewish American?

Hundreds of thousands — by some estimates millions – of people protesting against a fraudulent election and a repressive regime? Thousands streaming through the streets in silent protest? A revolution facilitated by a Web site that gives users only 140 characters to make their point?

For nearly a week now, I’ve been contemplating how to respond, and I can’t get past one fundamental thing: The ire of the Iranian people is directed squarely at President Ahmadinejad, a madman with well-known and often articulated anti-Semitic and anti-Israel views.

Here are some of the Ahmadinejad quotes that are seared into the collective conscience of my Jewish community:

  • “The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.”
  • “Israel is a tyrannical regime that will one day will be destroyed.”
  • “The real Holocaust is what is happening in Palestine where the Zionists avail themselves of the fairy tale of Holocaust as blackmail and justification for killing children and women and making innocent people homeless.”

This, and so much more.

I’m not naive enough to think that those people out on the street are somehow now embracing Israel. I doubt most of them have ever met a Jew — there aren’t many left in the country. This is clearly an Iranian uprising, with uniquely Iranian origins. But part of what the people are protesting against is Ahmadinejad’s totalitarian, anti-Democratic excesses, including his anti-Western sabre-rattling. It may not be linked, but they are risking their lives to stand against one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semites.

Before the election, it was so easy to imagine Ahmadinejad represented a monolithic Iranian viewpoint. When he said Israel would be erased, his was the voice of Iran.

Now, we see that Iran has another voice. And like everyone else, the Israelis are moved by what they hear.

“We are all revolutionaries here,” Bradley Burston writes in today’s Haaretz:

The people in Tehran’s streets have made it possible to begin to see past Ahmadinejad. I have to get used to Iran not as a cartoon bully, but as my neighbor. Not because they will go nuclear … though nuclear they may well go. But because it is a nation of people, as we are, not pawns in an increasingly obsolete revolution.

A nation of people. People who use cell phones and send tweets.

As much as we knew this before, if we stopped and thought about it, we see it now — we feel it — and that changes everything.

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Report: ‘The Sky Is Falling’

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I was starting to get depressed.

It seems that everyone I speak to in the Jewish community is worried. Obama is pressuring Israel, but not the Palestinians, they say. He’s naïve about Iran. And why did he go to Cairo and say that Israel’s founding was rooted in the tragic history of the Holocaust?

These, by the way, are the folks who voted for him in the last election.

I had breakfast in the Senate dining room this morning. After, in an ornate hallway, I picked up copies of three of the best newspapers covering DC politics.

The Hill newspaper had this four column lead: “Dems reel on healthcare.”

Congressional Democrats and the White House are scrambling to regain their footing after a series of setbacks has stalled political momentum to reform the nation’s healthcare system … The Democratic roll-out on health care has encountered significant bumps in the road.

Roll Call blared: “Health Care Bipartisanship Fades.”

As Senate health care negotiations enter the final phase at the committee level, Democrats are emphasizing their own policy preferences and conceding the unlikelihood of attracting significant Republican support for the legislation.

 
Obama’s top domestic priority, down the chutes, before anyone’s even seen a bill.

But, wait. There’s more.

Politico decreed: “Obama Draws Rural Dem Ire.”

Angered by White House decisions on everything from greenhouse gases to car dealerships, congressional Democrats from rural districts are threatening to revolt against parts of President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-year agenda.

The gay community is angry at him. Pesticide manufacturers are upset about the organic garden on the White House lawn. Doctors booed him this week for refusing to cap malpractice law suits. On Israel, my best friend’s mother feels personally betrayed.

And then I did something that everyone inside the Beltway, and everyone active in the Jewish subset of that world, should do – at least once.

On the way from the Capitol to my hotel, I stopped off at the Newseum on Pennsylvania Ave. I didn’t go inside. I just perused the exhibit they have along the sidewalk: morning front pages from around the country and the world. More than 50 in all, posted, neatly, in handsome window boxes.

Are you sitting? Brace yourself.

Exactly three front pages had stories on health care. One of those was the USA Today, and the other two — The Alabama Gadsen Times and the Mississippi Hattiesburg American – actually ran an AP article with favorable headlines, about how the Dems were trimming the cost of the health care bill.

The Wyoming Star Tribune had a story about health care, too – Medicaid, focusing on cuts in the Wyoming department of health.

Only nine of fifty newspapers had front page articles about the uprising in Iran – and that includes the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The Anchorage Daily news had the story, but it gave more prominence to a story about Gov. Palin’s pick for attorney general.

The Kentucky Enquirer did run a piece about concerns over nuclear power – but not in Tehran.  A new facility is planned for Piketon, Ohio.

In Montana, the Billings Gazette gave huge play to an animal cruelty case. The Morgantown, West Virginia Dominion Post had unsettling pictures of emergency workers trying to extricate a teenager from his overturned car. The news in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was about a bus that nearly tumbled down a city staircase. The Home News Tribune – my former hometown paper in Central Jersey – trumpeted: “Jeweler’s Death Still a Mystery.”

The stories about Iraq had a local angle. (The Telegraph, in Nashua, N.H., gave prominent play to a 23-year-old Salem High grad killed in Iraq over the weekend.) The scandals had a local flavor. (The Detroit News had a story about Conyers – not Michigan Congressman John – but city councilwoman Monica, facing bribery charges.) “’Magical Season’ ends for Cinderella Team” had nothing to do with the Magic of Orlando, and everything to do with the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles, whose baseball team lost in the College World Series.

There were front page stories about swine flu and fires, gas leaks and calorie counting, floods, misbehaving teachers, and great hamburgers.

Sure, you could sit down and google all of these local papers, and view them one at a time. But walking along the row of windows, looking at one after another, had a downright cathartic effect, all its own. It was as if, all at once, the inside-the-Beltway-Jewish-world bubble I’m living in burst, and a burden lifted. Not a single story about how President Obama is dragging the country over a cliff while simultaneously destroying the special relationship between the United States and Israel!

Here’s the thing: Obama knows what’s on the front pages of all those newspapers. He has a long view. He knows that even people who disagree with him are giving him a lot of leeway right now. (The Times has his approval rating at 63 percent today.)

He understands that most people – including most Jews – aren’t paying that close attention to Israel at this point; they are not parsing every word of his Cairo speech or waiting to hear Bibi Netanyahu’s response. They are, first and foremost, worried about their jobs and their health and their communities; they want their kids to come home safe from prom.

Yet at the same time, Obama knows Israel is critically important, not only to the United States, but to a broad swath of American Jews. That’s why he goes so far to affirm and reaffirm the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel; he knows full well that the Jewish claim to Israel is first and foremost about the land; he has filled his White House with pro-Israel Jews who send their kids to Jewish day school, like Dan Shapiro and Rahm Emanuel. Dennis Ross, the Middle East negotiator and staunch friend of Israel, just moved from the State Department to the White House, where he will have the president’s ear.

Obama is pressing a peace process that most Jews support, because he believes it is ultimately in Israel’s best interest, the only way for the Jewish state to achieve true security. My sense is that by and large, Jews — from Nashua to Hattiesburg to Kenosha — understand this, and hope fervently that he succeeds.

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Posted in Health Care, Iran, Israel, Jewish Interest, Media, Obama | 7 Comments »

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