Analysis: The Charming Iranian FM Dr Zarif

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Iran nuclear talks in AustriaTehran’s largest cemetery, Behesht-e Zahra, contains the graves of thousands of Iranians killed in battle. There’s also a polished stone monument bearing this inscription: “To the memory of two Muslim Lebanese youths who on the morning of Sunday October 23, 1983, in two simultaneous martyrdom operations, with trucks carrying explosives, attacked the headquarters of American occupiers (in South Beirut) and headquarters of French occupiers (in West Beirut) killing 241 American marines and 48 French paratroopers. Their names we do not know, but we will continue their path.”

We do know the name of the man who planned those mass murders – against not “occupiers” but international peacekeepers working under UN auspices at the request of the Lebanese government. Imad Mugniyeh was a commander of Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanon-based terrorist proxy. Among other attacks for which he was responsible: the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the prolonged torture and eventual murder of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley.

In 2008, Mr. Mugniyeh was assassinated. Last year, Iran’s foreign minister laid a wreath on Mr. Mugniyeh’s grave in Beirut.

And last week, at New York University, there was this event: A Conversation With “His Excellency Dr. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” What did he say in response to questions about the tribute he paid to Mr. Mugniyeh?

Not a word. No one thought to ask.

Instead, Dr. Zarif was given an opportunity to hold forth on a range of topics. The New York Timeswas impressed with his “suave fluency in English” and “familiarity with American history and law.” It found him “easygoing and smiling, living up to his image as a diplomatic charmer to an audience that was polite and respectful.”

However, Iran’s top diplomat did assume “a blunter tone” when discussing the U.S. Congress where there is bipartisan skepticism about the agreement that is to be finalized by June 30. In particular, he “took a few verbal pokes” at “Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who drafted a letter signed by 47 Republican senators warning Iran’s leadership that the validity of President Obama’s signature on an agreement could be undone by the next administration.”

“I think the United States, whether you have a Democratic president or whether you have a Republican president, is bound by international law,” he instructed, “whether some senators like it or not. And international law requires the United States to live up to the terms of an agreement that this government enters into.”

Just so we’re clear: “This government” means President Obama who is planning to “enter into” an agreement even if most members of Congress consider it detrimental to the security of the U.S and its allies. Mr. Obama plans to do this by not calling the agreement a treaty – which would require a Senate vote for ratification – but rather a non-binding “executive agreement” that he can then turn over to the UN Security Council which will produce what Dr. Zarif called a “mandatory resolution” that will bind the U.S. “whether Senator Cotton likes it or not.”

That last quip evoked laughter from the audience. “I couldn’t avoid [saying] that,” Dr. Zarif playfully conceded. “I am tempted to say you will pay for that,” responded the moderator, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius

I am tempted to say he will not — just as he is not paying for the fact that the government he represents is right now imprisoning four Americans, among them Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian. Asked about that by Mr. Ignatius, Dr. Zarif said he hoped Mr. Rezaian would be able to “clear his name” in an Iranian court.

In The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins – a journalist for whom I have enormous admiration — did report without equivocation that Dr. Zarif “is the foreign minister of a state that has killed hundreds of Americans (in Iraq, in Lebanon), and is possibly the world’s most active sponsor of terrorism.”

Mr. Filkins added: “He doesn’t apologize for, or even acknowledge, any of that. You get the sense, watching Zarif, that his most difficult job is not haggling over the details of a nuclear agreement with the West as much as keeping the darker forces in his own government at bay.”

That is indeed the conventional wisdom. But if it were true would he have laid a wreath at the grave of Mr. Mugniyeh? Was that part of his strategy for keeping those darker forces at bay?

Two of my Foundation for Defense of Democracies colleagues, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operative, and Ali Alfoneh, an Iranian-born scholar, have long been studying Dr. Zarif –reading his memoir, published last year, and just about everything else he’s written.

Their conclusion: The “affable foreign minister turns out to be every bit as religiously ideological as the radicalized student activist he was in the late 1970s” when Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran — “which Zarif still calls the ‘Den of Espionage’” – holding the diplomats hostage for 444 days. Dr. Zarif’s goal is “to preserve the Islamic revolution, not to transform it.”

This statement seems particularly telling: “We have a fundamental problem with the West and especially with America. This is because we are claimants of a mission, which has a global dimension. It has nothing to do with the level of our strength, and is related to the source of our raison d’être.” The Islamic Republic, he added, has a “defined a global vocation, both in the Constitution and in the ultimate objectives of the Islamic revolution. I believe that we do not exist without our revolutionary goals.”

What did Dr. Zarif say about that during the conversation at NYU last week? Not a word. No one thought to ask.

Town Hall

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25 responses to “Analysis: The Charming Iranian FM Dr Zarif”

  1. 5thDrawer Avatar
    5thDrawer

    Good article … good questions. Should be on front pages, but the ‘Fashions & Sports’ are all the ‘Good People’ want to know. Or, all the ‘Programmers’ want us to know.

    1. arzatna1 Avatar
      arzatna1

      This guy is full of it

      1. 5thDrawer Avatar
        5thDrawer

        Well … they DID let the kidnapped ship go … all crew apparently healthy … 😉

    2. MekensehParty Avatar
      MekensehParty

      “Them” programmers, right? 🙂
      be careful, YaLibnan can be one…

      1. 5thDrawer Avatar
        5thDrawer

        I’m helping promote the single-malts … shhhh

  2. zabada Avatar

    1.ya zahra..ya Ali ya Ali ya Zainab..2.Ya Jesus…Ya Jesus….3.Ya Allah (God)..Ya Allah…..you guess which one the best ?.

    1. Hannibal Avatar
      Hannibal

      Allah is in all of his creation…

      In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
      And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
      “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’” (John 1:14-15)
      Then Jesus said to John in the Apocalypse Revelations:
      I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.

      1. MekensehParty Avatar
        MekensehParty

        you need to update what you’re reading especially that this old book was written by Jews
        yek yek yek

        1. Hannibal Avatar
          Hannibal

          correction: My reference above is from the new testament…
          Honestly dude did you ever go to church? yek yek yek
          Besides I am not against the Jews… and I have never been. My neighbours and colleagues are Jews and we get along fine. The few subscribing to the new world order are a problem for you and I and the jews themselves…

          1. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            ‘Yu goann Suthern Baptist on us boy?? ;-))))

          2. Hannibal Avatar
            Hannibal

            lol

          3. MekensehParty Avatar
            MekensehParty

            The old and the new were written by Jews
            lololololol
            I know you have Jewish and Muslim friends, and a Canadian you mentioned one time, you live in America after all.
            re-yek yek yek

          4. Hannibal Avatar
            Hannibal

            Speechless at your intelligence… Do you flip burgers at Burger King?

          5. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            Hey Hannibal … I’d do it if my legs could stand for 12 hrs .. you should see the cuties in my local one … Chinese and Mexican … Mmmmmm ;-)))))

        2. Hind Abyad Avatar
          Hind Abyad

          The Bible came after Genesis.
          Genesis had already been written when Abraham entered Canaan from Ur. Jerusalem was already considered holly (referred to as Salem in Genesis)..long time before the city fell to David.

          1. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            And these days, we have ‘Genetics’. 😉

            (pssstttt .. don’t mention Salem Massachusetts ….)

          2. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            30 dead … 27 decide to leave … not very positive … nice to be ‘met’ by a Prez while ‘in transit’ … I guess. (photo-ops are endemic to Prez’s)
            “many workers travel illegally to Libya, through Egyptian or Tunisian borders ‎looking for a job.”‎ ….. With about as much success at staying alive as ‘boat people’, it seems.

            A ‘key-word’ about ALL of them is that ‘Illegal’, of course. And it seems some still want to stay there?? Is the money really THAT good??
            It’s a huge adjustment of thinking that the whole world needs to make, if it keeps making babies, when ‘Big Business’ requires fewer workers to produce more all the time. And Ethiopia sure knows about that … one reason they needed the damn dam with all those ‘square meter’ buckets being available on a regular basis to grow things, as well as to make electricity, when they insisted that ‘Nomadic Life’ should not be allowed any more.
            Following the rains was definitely better than baking in the sun, but the lure of ‘Big Business’ stacked them up in a city and they simply developed more dessert.
            ALL the world’s ‘Big Business’ should be paying a ‘Collectable-Monthly’ Tax – To Pay the ‘Big Business Farmers’ of the world – to grow More to FEED EVERYONE FREE BASIC NUTRITION – and especially all those who cannot ever find a job anywhere, EVEN WITH the gloriously advertised ‘High Techie Educations’.
            (Which would at least give them the energy to sweep the city streets more often.)
            If ‘Humanity’ doesn’t adjust itself to this ‘real need to eat’, it will simply be digging more holes for more bodies all the time … no matter how the dead bodies were ‘created’.
            Where is ‘Positivity’ to be found??

          3. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            I Have a Dream ….
            On the first floor of EVERY ‘high-rise’ and every second block of ‘suburbia’ in every city of the WORLD, a store-front with the sign over it ‘FREE BASIC NUTRITION STORE’.

            Even THAT would give a few jobs to the techies … and allow them time to TWIT as well.

          4. Hind Abyad Avatar
            Hind Abyad

            You see this from a Western point of view.. it’s a different
            reality in Arab countries, there are illegal workers trying to survive, others drown in the Sea trying to flee. That was not my point.
            ISIS beheaded Egyptian Christian working illegally or not.. not the government, these are Ethiopian Christians in transit fleeing ISIS, show me another Moslem leader of any other Moslem or “Christian” goverment in the whole Middle East, that goes out to show sympathy and support for Christians. Saudi Arabia? Qatar? Israel?

        3. cook2half Avatar
          cook2half

          He’s got nothing against the Jews, he’s racist towards everyone

          1. MekensehParty Avatar
            MekensehParty

            lol

          2. Hannibal Avatar
            Hannibal

            specially Iranian zionist wannabe… 😛

      2. 5thDrawer Avatar
        5thDrawer

        ( the up, the down … the in, the out … fire and water … earth and sky … Yin, Yang … Ein, Yo …)
        Attractive opposites. 😉 Like Hind …

        1. Hind Abyad Avatar
          Hind Abyad

          Attractive opposites.
          War and Peace.
          Crime and Punishment.

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