Israeli showoff for friends backfires

According to a report by The Tehran Times, in a heavily fictionalized report published on Saturday night in the New York Times, Ronen Bergman, who is mostly known as the official voice of the Israeli regime in the New York Times, claimed to have “revealed” some new, groundbreaking information regarding the assassination of the Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. 

The report did not add anything to the spectrum of this cowardly assassination by the Mossad. It was mostly information already published in media outlets put together.

The Times claims that its report is “based on interviews with American, Israeli and Iranian officials, including two intelligence officials familiar with the details of the planning and execution of the operation…”

According to the Times, the assassination occurred in the most fictional way, something that could only be spotted at commercial fictions in Hollywood. The authors seem to have forgotten that this is not some Mission Impossible scene.

Many Iranians looked at the report with a pinch of salt. The described fictionalized surveillance operation was something that caught the eyes of many Iranians, as well as a poorly described Fakhrizadeh. Who would have thought that the Times would resort to such desperate measures such as the ring late Fakhrizadeh wore? 

“…the machine gun, the robot, its components and accessories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran,” Bergman says in the report!

Expressions such as “sending data at the speed of light,” or “Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran” clearly shows that the piece was meant to be written as propaganda for the Israeli regime, and to show off the non-existent high-tech Mossad intelligence facilities. While there are several examples of Iranian intelligence power, which the Tehran Times is not authorized to discuss in detail, Iran has never felt the need to brag about its intelligence activities and continues to do its job in total silence. 

Well, there is no doubt that a report, co-authored by Ronen Bergman, is nothing but a cheesy attempt to promote and propagate Israel for its friends and allies. Now, why is the New York Times becoming a mouthpiece for propagating Israel? The answer lies within the disputes between the EU bloc, the United States, and Israel. 

The Israeli regime looks confused about the new approach taken by the American establishment. The case in point is the embarrassing withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the AUKUS pact, and even Biden taking a joyful nap in his meeting with the Israeli regime’s Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett. 

The piece says that preparations for the assassination began “after a series of meetings toward the end of 2019 and in early 2020 between Israeli officials, led by the Mossad director, Yossi Cohen, and high-ranking American officials, including President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the CIA Director, Gina Haspel.” 

Everyone knew that the assassination was done with the backing of the United States and it is evident that such cowardly acts could not have taken place without Washington’s consent. The Times have taken the bull by the horns! 

Bergman who wrote a book titled “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations”, is the co-author of this piece. It is no surprise to describe the assassination scene like a fictional Hollywood movie. 

The NYT must know that its readers are smart enough to be able to distinguish facts from fiction. It must also remember that it has not revealed a wow! factor. Most of what they published had already been on the news outlets. This is not investigative journalism.

Mideast tensions reach new highs with Trump's term nearing end

Israel’s normally tense relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran has grown more taught in recent days, as mutual threats and promises of retaliation have been lobbed by both governments while the sides await Joe Biden to take oath. 

On Sunday, the spokesman for the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian Parliament reacted harshly to last week’s news that an Israeli submarine had crossed the Suez Canal on its way to the Persian Gulf.

 “Israel must know that our response to aggression against our national security will be strong and massive,” Abu al-Fadl Amoui, told reporters, accusing the Jewish state of dragging the region “into a tension that creates chaos in the last days of the Trump presidency.”

Last week, a surfaced Israeli Dolphin AIP class submarine was spotted crossing the canal separating Israel and Egypt. According to several news outlets citing multiple sources, the rare – but not unprecedented – occasion was carried out with the approval of Cairo’s government and was meant to send a message to Tehran.

A few days later, Israeli military spokesperson Hidai Zilberman addressed the naval maneuver in an interview to a Saudi news site, noting that “Israeli submarines can sail everywhere” and urging Iran not to escalate the volatile situation.

“This isn’t the first time the navy has crossed the canal, so let’s not make too much of this. But yes, this was definitely meant for Iranian consumption,” a former commander within the Israeli submarine unit disclosed.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump joined the fray himself, responding to a reported Iranian attack on the American diplomatic compound in Iraq with a series of direct threats at the ayatollah regime.

 “Our embassy in Baghdad got hit… by several rockets… guess where they were from: IRAN,” Trump tweeted. “Now we hear chatter of additional attacks against Americans in Iraq. Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over.”

Precisely one month ago, Iran’s top nuclear official Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated on the outskirts of Tehran, in an ambush blamed by Iranian security authorities on Israel. In recent years, top officials within the Republic’s nuclear program, as well as its most senior military commanders, have been the target of successful strikes by Israel and the US.

The most noticeable of these was the January killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds force, in an American drone attack in a Baghdad airport.

“The main reason for the current tension between the US and Iran is the remaining time [President] Trump has in the White House,” Prof. Eytan Gilboa, an expert on US policy in the Middle East at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, informed.

“There are three more weeks, and Trump is known for his unexpected nature of decisions,” Gilboa notes, adding: “I would give a very low probability to an initiated American or Israeli attack onn Iran. But with Trump - you never know. A small incident can develop into war.”

President-elect Joe Biden has in recent months stated he plans on rejoining the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was reached between Iran, the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany in 2015.

The deal called for the winding down of Iran’s nuclear aspirations and efforts in return for a lifting of sanctions by Europe and Washington.

In May 2018, President Trump pulled out of the pact and embarked on his ‘maximum pressure’ strategy of imposing crippling economic sanctions on Iranian individuals and institutions. Tehran responded by restarting its uranium enrichment program several months after Trump’s announcement.

Following Biden’s victory in the November presidential elections, Iran’s top officials have repeatedly insisted they will refuse to renegotiate the JCPOA and will not consider reducing the Republic’s military involvement in other arenas in the Middle East, two demands Biden’s incoming team has hinted it will present in future talks.

“What we have now is psychological warfare and an exchange of messages, both for immediate military purposes and for the post-Trump diplomacy,” says Gilboa, who in the past has served as senior adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry and prime minister.

“Biden will eventually have to articulate a policy and decide which, if any, of the Iranian preconditions – removal of sanctions, the return to the unchanged 2015 deal, the freezing of the Gulf normalization process with Israel – he’ll accept.”

Another factor that may directly affect the Tehran-Washington-Jerusalem relationship in the coming months is the 2021 presidential election in Iran.

“Those are critical,” Gilboa stresses. “We’ve seen in the past how domestic events influenced Iran’s foreign policy,” he said.

Is the world ready to condemn murder of Iranian Nuclear Scientist?

Israel used all the four years of Trump’s presidency to entrench its systems of occupation and apartheid. Now that Joe Biden has won the US election, the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, likely by Israel with the go-ahead from the US administration, is a desperate attempt to use Trump’s last days in office to sabotage Biden’s chances of successful diplomacy with Iran. Biden, Congress and the world community shouldn’t let that happen.

On Friday, November 27, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in the Iranian city of Absard outside of Tehran. The immediate speculation was that Israel had carried out the attack, perhaps with the support of the Iranian groups.

In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified Fakhrizadeh as a target of his administration during a presentation in which he claimed that Israel had obtained secret Iranian files that alleged the country was not actually abiding by the Iran Nuclear Deal.

During 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated that included: Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. Though Israel never accepted responsibility of these murders, reports suggested that Israel, working with Iranian rebel groups, was behind the killings. The Israeli government also never denied the allegations. 

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh also follows reports that the Israeli government recently instructed its senior military officials to prepare for a possible US strike on Iran, likely referring to a narrowly averted plan by President Trump to bomb Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. Furthermore, there was a clandestine meeting between Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman.

Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear activities are particularly annoying given that Israel, not Iran, is the only country in the Middle East in possession of nuclear weapons, and Israel refuses to sign the International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons and it has opened itself up to the most intrusive international inspections ever implemented. Adding to this absurd double standard is the intense pressure on Iran from the United States, a nation that has more nuclear weapons than any country on earth.

Given the close relationship between Netanyahu and Trump, and the seriousness of this attack, it is very likely that this assassination was carried out with the green light from Trump himself. Trump has spent his time in the White House destroying the progress the Obama administration made in easing the conflict with Iran. He withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed an unending stream of crippling sanctions that have affected everything from the price of food and housing, to Iran’s ability to obtain life-saving medicines during the pandemic. He also blocked Iran from getting an IMF US$5 billion emergency loan to deal with the pandemic. In January, Trump brought the US to the brink of war by assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, and in an early November meeting with his top security advisors, and right before the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, Trump himself reportedly raised the possibility of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. 

After the news broke of the assassination, Trump expressed implicit approval of the attack by re-tweeting Israeli journalist and expert on the Israeli Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Melman, who described the killing of Fahkrizadeh as a “major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”

Iran has responded to these intense provocations with extreme patience and reserve. The government was hoping for a change in the White House and Biden’s victory signaled the possibility of both the US and Iran going back into compliance with the nuclear deal. This recent assassination has further strengthens the hands of Iranian hardliners who say it was a mistake to negotiate with the United States and that Iran should just leave the nuclear deal and build a nuclear weapon for its own defense. 

Iranian-American analyst Negar Mortazavi lamented the chilling effect the assassination will have on Iran’s political space. “The atmosphere will be even more securitized, civil society and political opposition will be pressured even more, and the anti-West discourse will be strengthened in Iran’s upcoming presidential election,” she tweeted.

The hardliners already won the majority of seats in the February parliamentary elections and are predicted to win the presidential elections scheduled for June. So the window for negotiations is a narrow one of four months immediately after Biden’s inauguration. What happens between now and January 20 could derail negotiations before they even start. 

Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council said that US and Israeli efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program have now morphed into Trump and Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President. They are trying to provoke Iran to accelerate nuclear work—exactly what they claim to oppose.

That is the reason US members of Congress, and President-elect Joe Biden himself, must vigorously condemn this act and affirm their commitment to the US rejoining the nuclear deal. When Israel assassinated other nuclear scientists during the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the murders, understanding that such illegal actions made negotiations infinitely more difficult.

The European Union, as well as some important US figures have already condemned the attack. Senator Chris Murphy pointed out the risks involved in normalizing assassinations, how the killing will make it harder to restart the Iran Nuclear agreement, and how the assassination of General Soleimani backfired from a security standpoint. Former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes tweeted that it was an “outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy,” and former CIA head John Brennan called the assassination “criminal” and “highly reckless,” risking “lethal retaliation and a new round of regional conflict,” but rather than putting the responsibility on the US and Israel to stop the provocations, he called on Iran to “be wise” and “resist the urge to respond.”

Many on Twitter have raised the question of what the world response would be if the roles were reversed and Iran assassinated an Israeli nuclear scientist. Without a doubt, the US administration, whether Democrat or Republican, would be outraged and supportive of a swift military response. But if we want to avoid escalation, then we must hope that Iran will not retaliate, at least not during Trump’s last days in office.

The only way to stop this crisis from spiraling out of control is for the world community to condemn the act, and demand a UN investigation and accountability for the perpetrators. The countries that joined Iran and the United States in signing the 2015 nuclear agreement —Russia, China, Germany, the UK and France—must not only oppose the assassination but publicly recommit to upholding the nuclear deal. President-elect Joe Biden must send a clear message to Israel that under his administration, these illegal acts will have consequences. He must also send a clear message to Iran that he intends to quickly re-enter the nuclear deal, stop blocking Iran’s US$5 billion IMF loan request, and begin a new era of diplomacy to dial back the intense conflict he inherited from Trump’s recklessness.