I spent a few minutes googling this afternoon. I wanted to see who was in favor of the Iran deal and who against. It turns out that nothing is a better litmus test for one’s attitude toward Jews and Israel. Here is a short list, in no particular order:
I left out people or organizations whose position was equivocal, like the Union for Reform Judaism and the Jewish Federations of North America. If Jews believed in the Devil, these organizations would have a hard time taking a position one way or the other on him, because it might be ‘divisive’.
So who are for the deal? The ones highlighted in red are those who can be reasonably called ‘Jew-haters’, who favor the deal because they see it as leading directly to dead Jews.
Also in favor are the terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO. They also like dead Jews; in addition, they stand to benefit almost immediately from the massive infusion of cash they will get from the Iranians. This goes for Bashar al-Assad too, of course, who needs all the help he can get these days.
An interesting set of pro-dealers are what I call the ‘soft haters’: J Street and Americans for Peace Now. They claim to be for peace and to care about Israel but they oppose anything that helps the Jewish state and favor anything that hurts it. I could have added commentators like Peter Beinart and Thomas L. Friedman to this group.
There are also those who fall in between the soft haters and the hard core Jew-haters. They more or less take the same positions as David Duke et. al., but they are more careful about their rhetoric. Jewish Voice for Peace and the academic Juan Cole fit here.
What’s left of the supporters are those who are close to or dependent upon Barack Obama. I thought about putting Hillary Clinton here, but she has very carefully hedged her bets. She’ll blow in the wind as events and polls dictate.
For the opposition, we have three main groups:
First, the people who are actually endangered by an empowered Iran, which includes all Israelis wherever they are on the political spectrum, and the moderate Sunni Arab regimes. Every dollar that flows to Hezbollah and every ounce of enriched Iranian uranium is bad for them.
Second, Republicans. Some of them are motivated by good sense and patriotism, understanding that Obama is taking America in a very dangerous — and cynical, even immoral — direction. Probably some just want to oppose Obama whenever and wherever they can. I want to believe that it’s mostly the former, especially in the case of those Republicans who will be running for President next year.
I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t Democrats on the right side of this. Most are being quiet, “studying” the deal. The pressure that can be brought on them by the party and its leader is immense. They like their jobs. Wouldn’t you?
Third and finally, we have the Jewish and Christian Zionist organizations who see the deal as dangerous for Israel and as marking an unprecedented split in the formerly good relationship between Israel and the US. These organizations, like the Israeli politicians, fall all over the left-right spectrum — from ADL to ZOA. But their primary objective is to protect the Jewish state.
An interesting argument can be made about the Christian Zionists: their critics claim they only support Israel because of their ‘end of days’ theology, which holds that Jesus will return after a major Middle East war. But if that is true, they should support the agreement with Iran, which if anything increases the chances of a destructive war in the region. And yet, they oppose it — possibly because they have been telling the truth about their biblical reasons for supporting Israel (Num. 24:9, Gen. 12:3, etc.) all along!
There are also a few media organizations that have actually done their homework and have pointed out the really big flaws in the deal — big enough, as someone said, to drive a truck bomb through. That would be the Wall St. Journal and the Washington Post. The NY Times, Obama’s Pravda, doesn’t do actual journalism on political subjects any more. It does have good crossword puzzles, and I used to like the book review section.
The truth is that the US politicians are impotent. Tomorrow morning, the UN Security Council will certainly approve the deal, making it much harder for the US to take unilateral action against it. Obama will announce that once the UNSC resolution has been passed, the US President will be bound to carry out its provisions, regardless of what the Congress says (or who the President is). The Congress will be furious, but they aren’t likely to impeach him and remove him, which is the only way they can stop him from ordering the release of funds and the end of sanctions.
The international sanctions regime is already on its way out. German business leaders have already flown to Teheran, and Russia is salivating over the size of the market for its weapons — after all, Iran is supplying half the terrorist militias in the world in addition to its own armed forces.
It’s a new Middle East out there, starting right about now. It’s a new America, too, although I wonder if most Americans realize that.
I have not seen a comparison list like this anywhere else. It does open the eyes.
But I don’t think it can really be the final basis for evaluation of the deal.
I am not qualified to evaluate the whole thing fully. I am against it because it means that ultimately, in ten or fifteen years Iran will be a major nuclear power.
I am against it because the billions of dollars for terror will be used to work to destroy Israel.
I am against it because it is rewarding and encouraging Evil.
But there is an argument for the deal. It is simply this. Without it Iran unchecked will have nuclear weapons which threaten Israel. This deal seems to mean that for ten or on another interpretation it will not have those weapons.
I say ‘seems to mean’ because Iran can break the deal and have them any way.
But if there is one argument for the deal is that it makes it difficult for Iran to have nuclear weapons in that time framework.
Shalom:
I do not believe that it in any way delays Iran from achieving nuclear weapons. With or without the deal, they can progress as fast as they like. What it does is insulate their program and protect it. Note the provisions that the West is required to help protect the program against ‘sabotage’. Now who would want to sabotage it?
http://irantruth.org/obama-agrees-to-be-bodyguard-for-irans-nuclear-program/
1) It seems to me for Iran to openly show that it has nuclear weapons would force the U.S. and even the others to act against it in some way. I don’t think that they will do this. But I could be wrong. After all they have gotten away with twenty years of lying and deception and are now being rewarded for it.
2)I somehow cannot grasp the ‘sabotage’ clause. It can only be directed against Israel. And it marks a new level of betrayal.
I wonder what this means if we actually do get into direct military conflict with Hizbollah and Iran.
I somehow cannot believe that the U.S. would actually take military action against Israel. I do not think even Obama would dare such a thing. But who knows?
He may be waiting now to reward us with another gift, the siding with the world against us at the U.N. on the ‘Palestinian state’ issue. Have you noticed the string of successes he has had, and his being in a state of maximum confidence and initiative? Perhaps he wishes to top his Presidency off with the final achievement, a tilt to Palestine satisfying his mentors Said and Khalidi which totally isolates and endangers Israel.
If Israel does not stop them, Iran will have nuclear weapons before Obama is out of office. They – the Iranians – would never have signed this deal if they weren’t very close to getting the bomb. This deal gets them ‘over the finish line’ under the protection of Obama. The next president would be faced with a fait accompli on the part of the Iranians. He’d be very reluctant to take action if they could hit back somewhere with even one bomb. Anyone would be reluctant to take action in that case, even Israel.
What is more, I’m sure Obama knows this. He is doing this to punish Israel for refusing to capitulate to him on the Palestinian issue. When Obama said a while back that as President of the U.S., he “wasn’t bluffing” on Iran, that was not directed at Iran. That was directed at Israel. What he meant was, if Israel doesn’t agree to commit national suicide by allowing a terrorist thug state to be set up immediately adjacent to Israel’s most important industrial and population centers, then he’s going to let Iran go nuclear. This is not some ‘grand re-alignment’ of U.S. foreign policy towards Iran at the expense not only of Israel, but of the Gulf Arabs, as some suggest. Obama sold $60 billion in arms to Saudia during his term of office, more than any U.S. president has sold to any individual country in a single deal, ever. He hasn’t sold a dime’s worth of weapons to Iran. He’s simply following through on his threat against Israel, on behalf of the Palestinians (who would be destroyed by the same Iranian bombs that would target Israel), and that is it. Now, the Saudis (who I maintain installed Obama as their anti-Israel Manchurian Candidate) are wetting their pants over this…an excellent illustration of the ‘law of unintended consequences’, if ever there was. Where Obama is delusional and naive – as opposed to being an outright liar – is that I do think he believes that a nuclear Iran can be “contained”, though in his twisted world view, he sees a nuclear Iran as a ‘positive’ in that it will ‘contain’ Israel.
I don’t have any inside information. But I expect Israel to stop Iran. I also expect it to lead to the bloodiest war in modern Israel’s history. And, with Obama still in office when this occurs, I expect Israel to face sanctions/embargoes or even expulsion from the UN as a result. But all of that is better than Iran developing nuclear forces.
Yes, Obama may very well take military action against Israel. I think it is very possible that he would U.S. military forces to try to frustrate an Israeli strike on Iran. But, I think Israeli planners will have taken this issue into account, and will deal with it in due course, in ways that I will not detail here.
I would not say that Obama has had a “string of successes”. Gay marriage and the wretched Obamacare cannot be counted as major “successes”. Overall, his administration has been a dismal failure. Except in the only area that matters to him, really: Making life hard for Israel.
In May of 1948, British military intelligence – hardly an amateur outfit; they had just presided over the defeat of Nazi Germany only three years prior – gave Israel THREE DAYS in the face of the Arab armies that faced her. The war lasted eight months, and Israel doubled her original territory.
In May of 1967, most observers were writing Israel’s obituary. The combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria outnumbered Israel’s by several times over in every major parameter of military power: men under arms, combat aircraft, tanks, artillery. Israel at that time had no major technological advantages over her adversaries. Egypt in particular had at least one weapon with no counterpart in Israel, TU-16 medium jet bombers that would have unleashed chemical weapons on Israel. But we all know how that turned out.
Though not representing an existential threat, the Entebbe hostage crisis of ’76 resulted in the most daring and successful hostage rescue mission carried out by any military in modern history, period. Before the fact, no one would have guessed that this raid was even a realistic option, let alone that it would succeed.
I expect Israel to stop Iran before this deal goes fully into effect. I can’t say when – and even if I could, I wouldn’t – but it could be in two weeks or it could happen in fourteen months. But I consider it far more likely than not, and I expect it to succeed.
Stout Hearts, everyone over there, and Jews everywhere. We’ll need them.