American Blackmail

Yossi Melman, noted Israeli author and security analyst, who is certainly no right-winger, wrote a piece in a recent edition of The Jerusalem Report which opens with: “The U.S administration is concerned about the possibility of a new confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest nuclear shenanigans. ‘We hope it won’t happen,’ a senior U.S. official tells The Jerusalem Report, ‘but if it does, it will be a completely different ball game. The administration will not sit idly by this time, and it will be vindictive.'”

This is akin to telling parents that a known child predator wants to abduct their children and has expressed the explicit desire to murder them, but if they notify the police, it will be a completely different ball game. The local government will not sit idly by this time, and it will be vindictive — against the parents who have the responsibility of protecting their children.

In actuality, the Obama administration’s outrage is completely legitimate, but it is directed at the wrong target: Israel. However, after seven years of the Orwellian world that we now inhabit, we have become conditioned to believe that this statement is almost normal.

Under international law, however, this is clearly upside-down and backward. It is Iran, after all, that violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929 (by firing missiles), the understandings reached in the July nuclear agreement and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Therefore, Iran should legitimately be the target of American as well as international outrage.

Iran is guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide. The IAEA is complicit in this guilt by closing the file on Iran’s nuclear program despite the fact that certain fundamental questions regarding prior military dimensions remain unanswered. The IAEA admitted as much on December 2, 2015, yet still decided to close the Iran file under what can only be explained as political pressure.

In 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the U.N. passed United Nations General Assembly Resolution 260, the Convention on the Punishment and the Crime of Genocide. Article 3 of this convention lists crimes that should be punished as (a) genocide; (b) conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) attempt to commit genocide and (e) complicity in genocide.

The Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention has compiled an outstanding collection of remarks made by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei between 2000 and 2015. The center came up with a few significant findings, including the fact that “Iranian state incitement against Israel has been explicit in its calls for destruction of the Jewish state. Pre-war Nazi propaganda used euphemisms and never explicitly called for the destruction of the Jews.” Official Iranian threats and incitement have “lasted for more than 30 years, as compared with Nazi governmental incitement, which lasted 12 years.”

They also found that the frequency and the intensity of Iran’s incitement to commit genocide has only increased the more the international community eased sanctions.

In fact, shortly after the July 14 agreement was reached, Khamenei issued a book titled “Palestine,” outlining in painstaking detail the steps that should be taken to annihilate Israel, which he described as “a cancerous tumor” whose elimination would mean that “the threats and hegemony of the United States will be replaced by Iran.”

The book sketches out how to eliminate Israel through an eternal chain of low-intensity assaults that will eventually make life so unbearable for Israelis that they will pack their bags and leave. He also wrote that the Iranian nuclear bomb would inhibit the Israelis against any sort of retaliation.

Since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was reached on July 14, both Iran and U.S. President Barack Obama have behaved in predictable ways. Iran has conducted two missile tests, one on Oct. 10 and one on Nov. 21, and on Dec. 29 fired a rocket within 1,500 yards of an American aircraft carrier, the USS Harry S. Truman in the Strait of Hormuz.

While Obama was trying to sell the JCPOA to Congress and a skeptical American public last summer, we were constantly assured of “immediate, snapback sanctions.”

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal last month, the U.S. Department of Treasury notified Congress that approximately a dozen companies or individuals in Hong Kong, the UAE and Iran were to face sanctions for working on the Iranian missile program, which not only violated the JCPOA but also U.N. Security Resolution 1929.

The Iranian government was quick to denounce the threat of new sanctions, calling them, “unilateral, arbitrary and illegal.” And just as swiftly and predictably, Obama caved under Iranian pressure and decided to delay imposing new sanctions, for an unspecified period of time. And now Iran has publicly unveiled a new underground missile site.

According to a report in The Washington Free Beacon, Democratic members of Congress who backed the deal are disappointed with the White House. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland said: “We are always in a sensitive moment in our dealings with Iran, and there is never a perfect time to take such actions. … But Iran must know with certainty that violating U.N. Security Council resolutions, both inside and outside the scope of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, will be met with serious consequences.”

Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) told The Wall Street Journal: “I believe in the power of vigorous enforcement that pushes back on Iran’s bad behavior. If we don’t do that, we invite Iran to cheat.”

It appears that America’s moral backbone, the IAEA and all the Democratic members of Congress who believed Obama’s reassurances of “immediate snapback sanctions” are currently being blackmailed by Obama’s quest for a foreign policy legacy.

Yes, Obama will, indeed, have a foreign policy legacy, but it will prove to be the same as Neville Chamberlain’s.

Originally published at Israel Hayom: https://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=14907