by Eldar Mamedov
In his inauguration speech, President Donald Trump vowed to eradicate “radical Islamic terrorism” from the “face of earth.” His top lieutenants have identified the targets of this effort. Rex Tillerson, in his confirmation testimony for secretary of state, lumped together the so-called Islamic State (ISIS or IS), al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and “some elements within Iran”—even though Shia Iran is bitterly opposed to the ultra-Salafist IS and al-Qaeda and, to a lesser degree, the Sunni fundamentalist MB.
Trump’s inner circle – his ideologue-in-chief Steve Bannon and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – seem to have an equally un-discerning view. As Bannon explained, addressing an audience in 2014, “I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam … If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.”
Yet, apart from such sweeping “clash of civilizations”-type assertions, this ambitious project looks remarkably scant on details. Although Bannon, for example, is very hostile to Saudi Arabia, he has never made his views on Iran known, nor is he on the record showing any understanding of the differences between Sunni and Shia. Flynn is known for his obsessive Iranophobia. And James Mattis, the Defence Secretary sometimes seen as a potentially moderating influence in the Trump cabinet, went as far as to suggest that Iran and IS may somehow be in cahoots.
Bannon and Flynn´s Islamophobia resonates strongly with the similar-minded populist nationalist parties in Europe, for whom this is one key aspect of their revolt against the “globalist elite”. But on Iran, the views seem to be diverging.
The far right’s most powerful European representative is Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front and, according to the polls, one of the leading contenders for the presidency in the elections in May 2017. In her role as a member of the European Parliament (EP), Le Pen has expressed some remarkably moderate views about Iran. For example, she tabled a number of amendments to the opinion of the EP’s International Trade Committee on the EU-Iran relations after the nuclear agreement.
One of those amendments removed the original language on Iran’s “self-chosen isolation”—drafted by Marietje Schaake, a Dutch liberal known for her strong criticisms of Iran’s human rights record and regional policies—and replaced it with a statement that the nuclear agreement “makes it possible for European countries to cooperate fully with Iran, to the benefit of all.” Another amendment deplores “the EU interference in Iran’s internal affairs” and reaffirms its right “to make sovereign choices.” In the same vein, she also rejects the notion that the EU has to use its economic leverage on Iran to push for human rights agenda, warning that such an approach could be perceived as “an imposition of Western values and cultural colonization.” In yet another clause, in reference to the existing US sanctions against Iran, Le Pen urges EU member states and the Commission to defend EU companies against the “extraterritorial applications of US law.”
None of these amendments was adopted, since there is an unwritten agreement between the two largest groups in the EP—the center-right Christian Democrats and centre-left Social Democrats—not to vote for amendments tabled by members of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), the far-right group of which Le Pen’s National Front is a founding member. Instead, at a later stage the EP overwhelmingly adopted the moderate and pragmatic report on EU-Iran relations drafted by the British Labour MEP Richard Howitt, a member of the Social Democratic group.
Another far-right member of the EP, Udo Voigt from the German neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, sits on the EP delegation for relations with Iran.
Several reasons might explain the European far right’s apparent fondness for Iran. First, it should be seen as part of a populist repudiation of the “liberal globalist elite,” with its notions of universal human rights and free markets. Like Vladimir Putin´s Russia with its emphasis on “traditional values,” Iran with its system of governance and defiant foreign policy is seen as a perfect embodiment of a challenge to this “elite,” and thus worthy of support. Some European extremists adore the Iranian system precisely for the same reasons that liberals abhor it, such as the widespread use of the death penalty, which they dream of bringing back to Europe.
Second, supporting Iran can be seen as a poke in the eyes of the continental elites enjoying too cozy relations with the Gulf monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which the European political class, intelligence services, and general public increasingly acknowledge as sponsors of Wahhabi extremism and blame for terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels.
In the end, however, the far right’s voting record in the EP suggests that for them Iran is more of an instrumental issue rather than a matter of firm convictions. For example, despite all the superficially Iran-friendly rhetoric, most members of the ENF either abstained or voted against the Howitt report (Le Pen herself abstained). Likewise, despite all the Saudi-bashing, Le Pen and two thirds of the ENF voted against the amendment calling on the EU to introduce an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia in the framework of the EP resolution on the humanitarian situation in Yemen adopted in February 2016.
This suggests that the European far right parties are most unlikely to play Iran’s representatives in a nascent transatlantic populist “international.” It seems far likelier that, if the European far right ever reaches the pinnacle of power in an important European country, it will not allow the divergent views on Iran to stand in the way of a common Islamophobic agenda with the likes of Bannon and Flynn, even at the cost of wrecking the nuclear deal. Which is another reason to avoid such a scenario at all costs.
This article reflects the personal views of the author and not necessarily the opinions of the European Parliament. Photo of Marine Le Pen by Claude Truong-Ngoc via Wikimedia Commons.
@ Jeffrey Wilens:
I’m a veteran of the Viet Nam War with 27 months combat service in that conflagration. Since I retired from my law practice in 2002, I’ve finally had time to study why I found myself on the other side of this planet dodging bullets and fighting patriots. It’s been a sickening investigation, all the more so because the idiocy that got us into Viet Nam has never ceased to rule in Washington, D.C. I’ve devoted the last 15 years to studying what gets the U.S. into wars.
I “have at least a rudimentary understanding in the biblical pronouncement concerning Israel,” although I am very far from believing anything in the Bible that can not be confirmed by hard evidence. Unfortunately for your position, the Bible can not be reconciled with your over-simplistic definition of “Zionism.”
Were I to accept that the Bible’s definition of Yretz Israel were controlling, then I would have to accept that modern Israel’s proper boundaries run (by one Biblical account) the entire expanse from the Nile to the Euphrates rivers, a position still espoused by several of Israel’s national leaders. I would also have to ignore the Bible’s commandment that Abraham’s son Ishmael and his descendants were to rule that kingdom. That gets in the way of your position because Ishmael’s seed never left that area, becoming that other semitic tribe, the Arabs. And I would have to ignore that it was to be a kingdom, not an apartheid caricature of a democratic state.
I would also have to repudiate God’s later pronouncement that the seed of Abraham was cast out of Israel for not abiding by the covenants, forbidden to return before the coming of the Messiah.
But rather than wallow in the internal inconsistencies of Israel’s founding myths, perhaps it’s better to observe that no court has ever held that ownership or control of the British Mandate Territory of Palestine is controlled by the Bible’s pronouncements. As quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court:
“The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal, not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal. . . . I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain-sailing, I can’t navigate, I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh there I’m a forester. . . . What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? . . . And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? . . . This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — Man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down . . . , d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow them? . . . Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
R. Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, Act I, pg. 147 (Three Plays, Heinemann ed. 1967), as quoted in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153, 195-196 (1978).
The State of Israel was created by force, by criminal paramilitary bands of Zionists who so terrorized the World War II-weary British administrators of Palestine that the U.K. government threw up its hands and asked the U.N. to decide what was to be done with the Territory. Suddenly, there was to be a European enclave in the Arab Mideast. But the much vaunted U.N. Partition Plan — which was only a recommendation to the U.N. Security Council — was never adopted by that Council because of sound objections by Arab nations that the plan violated the right of Palestine’s citizens to self-determination of their form of government. Whatever legitimacy the nation of Israel acquired came by way of later recognition by other nations and by later Security Council resolutions. The Partition Plan is a legal irrelevancy.
Some 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes (many at the point of Zionist paramilitary bayonets) as the paramilitaries ethnically cleansed the territories they seized, giving rise to the still burning question of the unmistakable right of those refugees to return to their homes, a right secured (amongst other authorities) by the 4th Geneva Convention’s Articles 7, 8, 33, 47, 49, and 53.
In 1967, Israel expanded its control to the entirety of Mandate Palestine via a surprise attack on Arab nations, also seizing portions of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. That of course raised the very substantial issue of whether the U.N. Charter, which forbids acquisition of territory by conquest absent the consent of the Security Council, was still a rule of law. No such acquiescence was ever to be issued by that Council. Instead, time and again, Israel has been ordered to return to its 1967 borders and just as many times, Israel has steadfastly disobeyed those instructions.
Israel did return seized territory to Egypt, but has subjugated the indigenous people in the remainder of those territories and even for the few indigenous Palestinians permitted to remain as citizens of Israel, more than 50 Israeli laws mandate that they be treated only as second-class citizens. Meanwhile Israel recognizes a right of “return” only for the Jewish “diaspora,” not for the indigenous residents of Mandate Palestine who were driven from their homes.
Justified by what? Only by (as you so eloquently expound) the “fact” that Jews are the “chosen people” that your vision of God gave the land to. Zionism is in fact founded on a claim of Jewish superiority; it is naked and raw racism, drawing its claim of legitimacy on religious tracts written some 2,000 years ago whose meaning remains murky at best and has no legal relevance to rights to control territory in Mandate Palestine.
Yet even that claim of religious justification can not be reconciled with claims of commonality with the U.S. We have a nation that recognizes freedom of religion and our Constitution’s First Amendment forbids our government institutions from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” See e.g., Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687(1994) (establishment of a Satmar Hasidim Jewish school district violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause). (Notice that the Court there faced a school district that was in effect a Jewish school district, not a school district that had an admitted religious purpose.)
Notwithstanding that the Establishment Clause’s plain language recognizes no territorial limit, we find our nation spending billions of dollars a year to financially and militarily support what is recognized by all as a non-secular “Jewish State” that does not even grant Palestinians in the Occupied Territory the rights secured to them by human rights treaties such as the 4th Geneva Convention. Instead, Israel continues to expand its settlements in that Territory, ethnically cleansing ever greater portions of Palestine. And Gaza? The largest open-air prison in the world where its people are being starved to death, kept deprived of even electricity to power their sewers and water systems, and periodically pounded with bombs and artillery? One need look no further to recognize that Zionists make exceedingly poor neighbors.
Fortunately, the International Criminal Court may soon speak to such issues, just as the International Court of Justice found illegal Israel’s notorious Apartheid Wall. See Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: Advisory Opinion, International Court of Justice (9 July 2004). But in the International Criminal Court, Israel’s leaders are apt to find themselves serving hefty prison sentences for their war crimes. And they deserve it.
Zionism deserves no more respect than its American counterpart, Manifest Destiny, a nefarious doctrine that was used to justify the ethnic cleansing of the native American population into ever smaller “reservations,” the same process now under way in Palestine. What is different in the two cases, however, was a change in the law. A war-weary world abolished the Right of Conquest by enacting the U.N. Charter, which froze the borders of all nations. Israel thus poses a challenge to that principle, claiming a right to “deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” which is specifically prohibited by the 4th Geneva Convention’s Article 47 and which the Security Council has repeatedly told Israel to cease and desist.
As one who was raised on the Nezperce Indian Reservation (my father taught school there), I grew up with native American children who had at best a life of alcoholism to look forward to. I have nothing but contempt for people who treat other people the way we have treated our indigenous peoples, as your Zionists treat the Palestinians. Zionists are not “chosen.” They are not superior. Zionists have neither legal nor moral right to treat indigenous people the way they have treated the Palestinians. Zionists are living in a fantasy world.
The Bible is irrelevant. It is not governing law. Fortunately, the Zionists have sown the seeds of their own destruction. As they expand into Palestine, they have made a two-state solution impossible. And the Palestinian Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement will force the single state solution within a very few years. Then what is left of Israel will have to come to grips with the Palestinians’ inalienable human right to equality. There will be no more “Jewish State.”
As to the remainder of your post that I respond to, your position on the Iranian nuclear weapons myth is representative of your thinkings’ worth: You said, “[t[hat’s your opinion but I trust the opinion of others who find otherwise.” But in the article on my web site that I directed you to, there are links establishing that Mossad, the combined consensus position of all U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as European intelligence agencies is that Iran had no nuclear weapons program and had made no decision to acquire such weapons. Moreover, the IDF’s report did not identify Iran as an existential threat to Israel, something it would have done if IDF professionals believed that Iran was working toward a nuclear weapon. Moreover, I pointed to evidence that the purported Iranian documents evidencing the existence of a nuclear weapons program were fabrications created by an Israeli propaganda unit. On your side of that issue, you will only find the pompous bluster of Bibi Netanyahu, who desperately needs a foreign existential threat to stay in office, a man who ignored Mossad’s report on the very issue.
On the Zionist role in getting the U.S. into war in Iraq and Syria, I’ll not belabor the point much because this post is already too long. Let it suffice to observe that the fools you mention who thought they could export democracy to Iraq were Zionist neocons who fabricated their “evidence” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, as the entire world now knows. See for example the Wikipedia entry on Project for a New American Century. In 1996, some of the same Zionists prepared a report for Benyamin Netanyahu recommending the same strategy, as well as engaging Hezbollah and Syria. See Wikipedia: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (detailing Israel’s interests in war against Iraq). That the same group of Zionists later dictated U.S. foreign policy in regard to Iraq during the Bush Administration should be sufficient to convince you that Zionists played a very large role in getting the U.S. to invade Iraq. If not, there is no shortage of other evidence.
Those Zionists may have fervently believed that Israel and the U.S. had a shared interest in invading Iraq, But either way, it was an illegal war of aggression, the ultimate war crime. Neither the U.S. nor Israel had any legitimate interest in committing war crimes so we need not belabor whether there was a common interest; if there was, it was a criminal interest of individual Zionists, not a legitimate government interest. And thus the U.S. waged a war against Iraq for Zionists, who characteristically have little or no respect for law.
Moral of my tale: Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-semitism. Zionism is a political philosophy that has no relationship to Judaism. Many Jews are anti-Zionist. Many Christians are Zionists. Conflating Judaism with Zionism to level a charge of anti-semitism is nonsense. Zionism is a perverse political philosophy that has no respect for human rights. That it is the dominant political philosophy is Israeli government speaks loudly to the perversity of Israeli government, not to Judaism.
And by the way, Phillip Weiss, publisher of Mondoweiss, is an anti-Zionist Jew. He most emphatically is not an anti-semitic Jew-hater.
I didn’t see Jeffrey responding to my comment on page 2 about Bin Laden.
But maybe the only way to open his eyes is to signal to him that the company that tried to smear his reputation is owned, seemingly, by an Israeli from Las Vegas. Sadly this is also the type of behavior that we encounter in the corridors of the media or the U.S. Congress.
Merrell, I appreciate your service on behalf of the country, but unfortunately it seems the shock of war or exposure to a chemical or something has warped your mind and now you don’t share American values.
I have never met an Anti-Zionist who was not also an Anti-Semite. Your twisted view of basic theology (mixing up Ishmael and Isaac) shows an anti-Jewish viewpoint that is also contrary to standard Christian theology. The Jewish people are the indigenous people of Israel. The so-called Palestinians were invented in the 1960s, before that they were just Arabs. Unlike the Native Americans, there was no distinct Palestinian Arab civilization, culture or nation in history. Your analogy fails miserably.
You are correct there are leftist ethnic Jews who oppose Zionism. There are also American veterans who have turned on the US government, although I don’t see you offering to return your home to the Indians despite your disdain for “Manifest Destiny.” Hypocrisy is very common on the left. If you really cared about human rights you would never support replacement of Israel (where atheists like you are perfectly safe) with a Muslim Arab state.
There is nothing inconsistent between Zionism and human rights. The Muslims would like to recapture what they consider to be their Islamic land. Their are Fatwas against giving up Muslim land to non-Muslims. The Israelis have to be tough with the Arabs or the Fatwa will be executed and the Jews will be dead. Maybe you have no problem with more Jews being killed but they do.
Therefore, Israel and her supporters are not going to listen to you, Muslim dominated UN bodies and certain not any fake “International Court” staffed by banana republics and Islamic states. That’s a kangaroo court and the US does not recognize or abide by it either. Let the ICC condemn Russia or China and see how far that goes.
Maybe Kapo Jews like the Mondoweiss fool or J Street losers are prepared to surrender to the Muslims but most of Israel and her allies in the United States will not. Finally, we have a President who, by all appearances, is prepared to push back hard against these world bodies and stand by our allies.
If you really care about the Palestinians you should attempt to persuade them to sue for peace and cut the best deal they can. The Arabs started a war of aggression in 1948 (actually before) and while a few Arabs states have signed peace treaties, thanks to delusional people like you, the Palestinians have been egged on with unrealistic expectations. Losers do not dictate the terms of surrender. The USA lost the Vietnam war and the victors determined the terms of the “peace,” which meant Communist rule over all of Vietnam.
Jeffrey, you fail to distinguish between “anti-Zionists” who favor an independent Palestine in the West Bank as a means of protecting Israel’s democracy, and those who want to end Jewish control of Israel/Palestine.
James, I don’t consider someone anti-Zionist merely because they believe (naively) that setting up a Muslim Arab state in the West Bank would lead to peace. Obviously there are a number of pro-Israel persons who believe that but they are just misguided. Gaza is something that does not need to be reproduced.