Tehran Threatens a Think Tank The regime targets a U.S. group for opposing the 2015 nuclear deal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tehran-threatens-a-think-tank-11567205715
As Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif negotiates with Europe to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive, he sells the Islamic Republic as a normal government wronged by a rogue Trump Administration. This is a sham, and Tehran has proved it again by targeting an American think tank for retribution.
Last week the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO Mark Dubowitz of “economic terrorism” and “actively trying to harm the Iranian people’s security and vital interests.” Tehran claimed that the independent think tank “is in fact the designing and executing arm of the U.S. administration.”
As Mr. Dubowitz wrote Friday on these pages, “according to the law cited against us, Mr. Zarif has already coordinated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] and Iran’s Intelligence Ministry in developing sanctions against FDD.”
The regime’s apologists draw a false equivalence between these sanctions and U.S. restrictions placed against Iranian officials and the IRGC. But producing research, lobbying lawmakers and educating the public is not the same as spreading terrorism around the Middle East. FDD has been an important critic of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but the group’s only influence is with ideas.
This isn’t the same as Ayatollah Khomeini ’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. But it still needs to be taken seriously because Iran’s agents use terror against adversaries around the world. The regime has been tied to several terror plots on European soil in recent years, and in 2011 the FBI stopped an Iranian plan to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton have condemned the new sanctions, and many JCPOA defenders have expressed support for a think tank they’re frequently at odds with. The next Democratic presidential debate is a good opportunity to ask the candidates to explain their Iran policy—and whether they condemn the threat to FDD.
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