Killing the worst deal ever (5)

The media continue studiously to ignore the meaning and revelations of the Israeli intelligence coup announced this week. The media were of course willing tools of the Obama administration’s promotion of the deal. There is no reason they might want to reconsider their role in the context of the Trump administration’s great undoing. I want to pause over this episode in a few more posts.

To the extent attention has been paid, the Obamabots and their media tools insist that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s presentation on the Iranian nuclear archive (which I think barely scratched the surface) added nothing to what they already knew. Here they demonstrate once again that they seek to force us into the world Orwell made in 1984. They are to assume control of language and of memory.

Today President Obama and his faithful servants advise us that they knew their friends in Tehran were lying through their teeth to us about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Nevertheless, this is not quite what they told us at the time, and we are not talking here about ancient history.

It is only five years ago that President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly and cited the alleged fatwa of Iran’s Supreme Leader (that’s what Obama called him) as proof of the Iranian regime’s peaceful bona fides. Obama stated: “The Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.” And that wasn’t all! “President Rouhani has just recently reiterated that the Islamic Republic will never develop a nuclear weapon.”

Jordan Schachtel reminds us that Obama again brought up the nonexistent fatwa in a 2015 address commemorating the Persian holiday of Nowruz. He asserted: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon.”

Schachtel adds this pertinent 2014 quote from Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry: “President Obama and I both are extremely welcoming and grateful for the fact that the supreme leader has issued a fatwa,” former Secretary of State John Kerry added in 2014.

In fact, no such fatwa was ever issued by Supreme Leader Khamenei. It does not exist. Neither the Iranian regime nor anybody else can present it. I collected MEMRI’s research on this question at the time in the post “Fatuous fatwa twaddle.” Did Obama and Kerry themselves believe it or were they just peddling boob bait for their media friends?

The asinine former Obama administration official Tommy Vietor takes another approach. According to Vietor, the Israelis cooked up the nuclear archive. See Armin Rosen’s Tablet column “Ex-Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor says stolen Iranian nuclear archive was ‘cooked.’”

The difference between Kerry and Vietor illustrates David Harsanyi’s observation: “Though they have yet to coalesce around a suitable talking point, some have already argued that the deal should stay in place because Iran lies. But in reality, from beginning to end, the deal has been a disaster for the United States and for peace. It has empowered our enemies and undermined our allies. There has never been anything quite like it.”

What an unsavory and duplicitous crew.

UPDATE: In his excellent Atlantic column this morning, Reuel Marc Gerecht puts it this way: “I really don’t recall [Obama NSC official Ben] Rhodes and Kerry before the JCPOA was concluded harping on the consummate dishonesty of these people.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses