As the Biden administration eyes reentering the nuclear deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, it received a couple of reminders recently of the dangers of trusting such states.
On Dec. 23, an Argentine federal court acquitted Carlos Telleldin, who was “charged with supplying the truck that was used in the deadly terrorist bombing of the [Argentine Israelite Mutual Association] Jewish center [in Buenos Aires] on July 18, 1994, in which 85 people were murdered and more than 300 wounded.” The following day, two judges in Pakistan’s Sindh region ordered the release of Omar Sheikh, who was convicted of being “the mastermind of the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl” in 2002, along with three collaborators.
The first case was an example of the blood on Iran’s hands and the world’s inability or unwillingness to hold Tehran accountable. Toby Dershowitz, senior vice president for government relations and strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noted that “Argentina was on its way to achieving a measure of justice when [prosecutor] Alberto Nisman provided granular evidence that Iran conceived the plan to bomb the AMIA. Interpol issued red notices for senior Iranian officials. And, after 25 years, Argentina finally officially designated Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy that carried out Iran’s plot, as a terrorist entity. With that, assets could be frozen and reputationally, Hezbollah could no longer get away with calling itself a humanitarian organization. The veil of protection was lifted. Many around the world rallied around the quest for justice in the AMIA case. Iran’s role was hardly in doubt. Argentina even considered amending its laws to allow a trial in absentia.”
And then, in January 2015, Nisman was killed while preparing to “present compelling evidence to the Argentine Congress implicating Cristina [Fernandez de Kirchner] in a plot to erase Iran’s role in the AMIA attack.” Telleldin’s acquittal in December added insult to injury, and highlighted the consequences of protecting, rather than isolating, Iran on the world stage.
Daniel Pearl’s experience was different. An American in Pakistan, Pearl was reporting on shoe bomber Richard Reid and trying to understand “why they hate us so much.” Still, Pearl’s Jewish heritage mattered. His videotaped beheading included the words, “My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish,” as if those details justified his barbaric murder.
To 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who ended Pearl’s life, they did. KSM confessed at Guantanamo: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan.” As Pearl friend and co-director of the Pearl Project Asra Nomani wrote, “KSM told the FBI [in 2007] he believed that killing a Jew would make for powerful propaganda and incite his fellow jihadis.”
This matters a great deal — and was a source of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s failure on Iran. In 2015, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg confronted Obama over Goldberg’s belief that “it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views.” In other words, they don’t understand “the world as it actually works.”
Obama’s naive and unsatisfactory reply would presage his disastrous deal with Tehran: “Well, the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power.”
In fact, Obama was wrong. Such regimes are playing by different rules because they perceive the world differently. It’s not about bigotry but about an all-encompassing worldview.
Pearl’s murder and the Jewish community center bombing occurred eight years and continents apart, but there are commonalities, including in their lessons.
And anti-Semitism isn’t the only animating feature of such a distorted worldview. In 2016, Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang was a supporter of Obama’s nuclear deal and went to Iran while working on his dissertation. He was arrested and held in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for more than three years. In September, he wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs reflecting on the lessons he learned the hard way.
“Anti-Americanism lies at the core of the Islamic Republic’s state ideology. … The need to maintain hostility against the United States, regardless of the U.S. policy orientation toward Iran, is widely acknowledged among Iranian officials,” Wang wrote. “A prisoner who had worked in a high government office told me that Saeed Jalili, the former secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, had commented that the regime does not want any reconciliation with the United States because it would undermine the regime’s legitimacy.”
What Obama’s team, which is now Biden’s team (and of which Biden was a part), based its policy on was a belief in reconciliation with a regime that believed it existed precisely to thwart such reconciliation. The hatreds of the regime cannot be separated from its interests, because it sees them as one and the same.
Dershowitz reflected: “We cave to the threats by Iran at our own peril not because many of the AMIA victims were Jewish but because the Islamic Republic uses these same tactics to intimidate others around the world. Countries who fear holding Iran and Hezbollah accountable wrongly assume that they will be protected. The fact pattern of Iranian terrorism on European soil, for example, exposes this falsehood even as Europe has resisted taking strong and decisive action against Iran in the face of terrorism and other malign activity.”
Events continue to bring reminders that Biden and his advisers seek to deal with an Iran that exists only in their imaginations, and that’s dangerous for us all.
Melissa Braunstein (Twitter: @slowhoneybee) is a former State Department speechwriter and an independent writer in Washington, D.C.
