Anti-Iran Deal Groups Backed by $145m
Eli Clifton, LobeLog, Jul 21 2015
A high-profile list of Pindosi non-proliferation, nuclear policy, Iran, and national security experts welcomed last week’s announcement of a deal between the P5+1 and Iran to curb Tehran’s nuclear program. Opponents of the deal, meanwhile, will make a last-ditch effort to derail the agreement reached in Vienna. They will use the 60-day congressional review period to pressure Congress critturs many of whom owe their seats to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, to vote to reject the deal. The groups leading this charge may be coming from a point of disadvantage. After all, it’s a tall task to convince Congress to sabotage an agreement negotiated by the Pindo government alongside its closest European and NATO allies vassals. But the budgets behind these groups will no doubt amplify their voices, giving them an outsized influence during the next two months. Taken together, eight of the most vocal groups opposing the Iran deal enjoyed a combined 2013 budget (the last year for which records are publicly available) in excess of $145m. That’s hardly an insignificant number, especially compared to other foreign-policy lobby groups. Here’s a breakdown of those groups, their 2013 budgets, and the anti-deal statements issued either by the organizations themselves or their leadership:
- AIPAC (2013 budget: $64,367,763). Anti-deal statement:
Congress should reject this agreement, and urge the administration to work with our allies to maintain economic pressure on Iran while offering to negotiate a better deal that will truly close off all Iranian paths to a nuclear weapon.
- ADL (2013 budget: $58,137,559). Anti-deal statement:
We are deeply disappointed by the terms of the final deal with Iran announced today which seem to fall far short of the President’s objective of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon state.
- The Israel Project (Annual budget: $7,165,162). Anti-deal statement:
Today’s announcement of this nuclear agreement with Iran is a realization of the deepest fears and the most dire predictions of skeptics who have, for two years, been warning against exactly this outcome: a bad deal that both enriches this tyrannical regime and fails to strip Iran of nuclear weapons capability.
- Foundation for Defense of Democracies (2013 budget: $7,108,010). Anti-deal statement:
Ayatollah Khomeini would be proud of his successors, committed revolutionaries and skilled diplomats who, through guile and determination, have out-negotiated the envoys of the ‘Great Satan,’ thereby preparing the ground for the many battles, not just diplomatic, yet to come.
- ZOA (2013 budget: $3,909,965). Anti-deal statement:
This agreement will provide nuclear weapons and hundreds of billions of dollars to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Hitler of the Mideast, and to Iran, the Nazi Germany of the Middle East.
- Republican Jewish Coalition (2013 budget: $3,062,340). Anti-deal statement:
This deal meets zero of the criteria for a good deal: it is not enforceable, verifiable, or in Pindostan’s national security interest. Unless Congress stops it, the world will be less safe as Pindostan will remove sanctions on Iran, and in return, Iran will still pursue nuclear weapons. The Republican Jewish Coalition calls on all upstanding Congress critturs to reject this deal.
- United Against Nuclear Iran (2013 budget: $1,223,566). Anti-deal statement:
Anytime you give $150b, minimum, and then all the revenue that’s generated by the influx of business as sanctions are relieved, it will embolden a regime that’s already emboldened in the region and it doesn’t take that much money to fund Hezbollah, Hamas and I think we’d be naïve to think that none of that money will benefit their hegemonic ambitions.
- Emergency Committee for Israel (2013 budget: $708,385). Anti-deal statement:
Brilliant Obama diplomacy: In exchange for billions of dollars & removal of sanctions, Iran has agreed not to dismantle its nuclear program.
These organizations, only a short list of the groups opposing the Iran deal, had a combined 2013 budget of $145,682,750. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account the tens of millions of dollars being spent through various dark-money groups to run television commercials and newspaper advertisements. AIPAC, for instance, says it will spend an additional $20m through a newly-formed advocacy group, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. And the Emergency Committee for Israel last year routed nearly $1m to support Tom Cotton’s Senate campaign, more than their entire budget in 2013. With Netanyahu threatening to “kill himself” to prevent a deal, and his wealthiest Pindosi backer, Sheldon Adelson, apparently willing to provide critical campaign cash to Republican Congress critturs and presidential hopefuls, neither Netanyahu nor the GOP will likely back down in the next 60 days. The White House is headed toward a battle with an extremely well-endowed set of opponents.
AIPAC Spin-off Relies on MeK
Eli Clifton, Ali Gharib, LobeLog, Jul 21 2015
When AIPAC declared war on the nuclear accord signed last week in Vienna, it put its money where its mouth is. AIPAC, Washington’s most influential pro-Israel lobby, reportedly plans on spending $20m over the next two months urging Congress critturs to vote against the deal. But AIPAC’s efforts at a full frontal attack on the accord are leading to some politically awkward alliances. As part of its efforts to kill the deal with a Congressional vote, AIPAC launched a 501(c)4 advocacy group called Citizens For A Nuclear Free Iran (NFI). According to the NYT, spokesman Patrick Dorton said NFI was formed with the sole mission of educating the public “about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal.” The NYT reported that the $20m budget would go to ad buys in as many as 40 states, as well as other advocacy. Now that the campaign is taking shape, NFI appears to be relying on a typical if troubling ally of such Pindosi anti-Iran groups. Two items on its website, one of which was later removed, featured the MeK. The MeK makes a cameo appearance in NFI’s television ad, as well as in the now-removed news item on the group’s webpage “Press Room”, indicating that NFI recognizes it made a PR misstep by promoting the group.
Above is the ad that NFI is splashing across television screens the country over, which the group posted to YouTube on Friday. It incorporates B-roll footage from a press conference held by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which the State Dept deems to be the MeK’s “political wing, earning it a corresponding terrorist designation. The footage in the NFI ad shows Alireza Jafarzadeh, a long-time Washington-based MeK apparatchik, at the National Press Club, aiming a pointer at a satellite photograph. It’s not clear which press conference the footage is taken from; the MeK holds these sorts of events frequently. As Jafarzadeh gestures at the photograph, the slickly produced ad’s voiceover says “Military sites can go uninspected,” and the words “Over 50 military sites” flash onto the screen. Ali Safavi, who works with the NCRI, said when asked about the commercial:
We were not aware of this matter, though the statements and B-roll footage are in the public domain.
The MeK’s most prominent act since the 1981 bombing of Iran’s Islamic Republic Party headquarters, which killed 73 party officials, was its 2002 public exposure of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and Arak heavy water production plant for plutonium extraction. Although the MeK claimed its clandestine network in Iran had unearthed the nuclear facilities, the New Yorker reported in 2006 that Israeli intelligence had passed the information about the sites to the MeK. Since exposing Natanz and Arak, the MeK has periodically drummed up publicity for other purported blockbuster revelations; many turn out to be busts. This winter, as nuclear talks with Iran heated up, the MeK released a report they claimed exposed a secret Iranian enrichment facility. The report garnered much credulous press from right-wing media and even a mainstream outlet or two. But a blogger at the Daily Kos quickly noticed that the photograph the MeK claimed was a steel door to the secret facility, had been ripped from the public website of an Iranian company that sells safes. According to the Sunlight Foundation’s Political Ad Sleuth project, NFI has already inked 247 contracts to air the ad, some of which went into effect last Friday.
NFI’s dalliance with the MeK, however, didn’t end at drawing footage from one of the opposition group’s press conferences. In the “Press Room” section of NFI’s website, the group late last week reprinted an item from Arutz Sheva (link added – RB) that promotes the MeK’s views on the nuclear deal. Screencaps can be viewed here and here. The Arutz Sheva headline carries over to the NFI website, and the article paraphrases quotes from an interview with Maryam Rajavi, the co-leader of the MeK. Her husband Massoud, the other co-leader, has not been seen publicly in a dozen years. In the interview, according to Arutz Sheva, Rajavi condemned the deal and in their words “called on the international community to work to replace the Islamic religious regime in Iran.” On Sunday, NFI pulled the Rajavi article from its “Press Room” page. No explanation was given, and a query to them on the issue went unanswered.
Pulling the article from its website may indicate that NFI realized the potential public relations problems that associating NFI with the MeK could bring. With bizarre Islamo-Marxist guerrilla roots, the MeK and its affiliates were listed as terrorists by the Pindo State Dept thanks to years of violence, including attacks against Pindosis and the Shah’s government in Iran in the 1970s and, after falling out of favor with Iran’s revolutionary clerics, the Islamic Republic. But the designation was lifted in 2012, as part of a deal to try to extricate remaining MeK members from peril in Iraq, where the group had fought alongside Saddam Hussein but was disarmed in the 2003 Pindo invasion. The MeK’s multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign to get removed from the terror rolls gave it new prominence in Washington. Its ardent anti-Iranian regime stance, robust lobbying operations and hefty political donations have kept up their favorable relations with many hawks on Capitol Hill, despite the group’s reputation for cult-like behavior and past human rights abuses against its own members.
Rajavi and her followers use their contacts in Washington to relentlessly push for overthrowing the Iranian regime, and making this goal official Pindo policy. Rajavi counts among her supporters one of NFI’s advisory board members: former Democrat and former senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman has made several appearances at MeK events, including this June, when he appeared at a MeK confab in Paris. Lieberman told the audience there that Pindostan “should be working closely with your resistance group,” making, in other words, regime change into an official Pindosi policy. For more background, see our February feature in The Intercept on the MeK’s history and influence in Washington. A spokesman for NFI did not respond to a request for comment about whether it supported a Pindo policy of regime change in Iran.
Niqnaq 
