RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran “has fully implemented its required commitments.” That was the representation Obama secretary of state John Kerry made to the American people in announcing on January 16 — “Implementation Day” of President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (aka, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) — that international economic sanctions were consequently being lifted against Iran.

Secretary Kerry added that “Iran has undertaken significant steps that many, and I do mean many, people doubted would ever come to pass.” Still, Kerry promised, the Obama administration would continue watching the mullahs like a hawk, thus “assuring continued full compliance” with the regime’s JCPOA commitments.

The same day, President Obama signed an executive order lifting a number of U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. We now know he also set in motion a furtive $400 million cash transfer to the regime as a ransom (which the administration calls “leverage”) for the release of four American hostages — the first installment of a carefully structured $1.7 billion side payment to Iran (ostensibly in settlement of a failed 1970s arms deal), details about which the administration continues to withhold from Congress and the public.

All of this was based on this purported “full implementation” of Iran’s “required commitments” under the JCPOA touted by Obama and Kerry. And all of it was a deliberate, audacious, elaborately plotted lie.

The Institute for Science and International Security (hereafter, the Institute) reported on Thursday that Iran was not in full compliance with its JCPOA commitments on Implementation Day, as was required — we were led to believe — before Iran was to get sanctions relief. What’s more, the Obama administration not only well knew that Iran was not in compliance; it also colluded with Iran, through the secretive JCPOA device known as the “Joint Commission,” in order to exempt Iran’s multiple violations from compliance requirements.

Got it? As Obama and Kerry were telling you that Iran had “fully implemented its required commitments,” and that the administration would continue working energetically to ensure future continued “full compliance” with those commitments, Obama and Kerry were working with Iran to excuse its flouting of its commitments — and, it turns out, to lay the groundwork for future “exemptions” from compliance.

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran. “It worked,” he insisted.The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

On Monday, the Iranian propaganda outlet, Tasnim, reported that Iranian anti-aircraft crews succeeded in detecting and warding off a U.S. spy drone that strayed into Iranian airspace from neighboring Afghanistan. If true, it would mark yet another US-Iranian clash in the region. Though the instant confrontation was relatively minor and did not result in injury or damage, it is demonstrative of the more aggressive and assertive tone the Iranian military is taking with respect to its dealings with the United States and the region since the signing of Obama’s much touted Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the plan that provides the Islamic Republic with a legal pathway toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

According to a U.S. defense official, U.S. and Iranian naval vessels interacted on at least 300 occasions in 2015 and on more than 250 occasions this year alone. Many of those encounters were relatively benign but some were the result of egregious Iranian provocations.

In December of 2015, Iranian navy boats fired rockets within 1,500 feet of aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. On January 12, 2016, an Iranian drone flew uncomfortably close to the Harry S. Truman. A U.S. Navy spokesman called the flyover “abnormal and unprofessional.” The Navy could have easily downed the drone but inexplicably chose not to. Such an action would have sent the Iranians the proper message without causing loss of life but the drone was nevertheless allowed to conduct its surveillance unmolested.

The very day that the drone was shadowing U.S. naval forces, the Iranians seized 10 American navy personnel and two Riverine Command Boats near Farsi Island in the Arabian Gulf. The RCB is heavily armed and armored but despite overwhelming firepower, the RCB crews humiliatingly surrendered to the Iranians without firing a shot. The crew and its commander displayed an abject lack of fighting spirit. A Pentagon investigation revealed that there were morale and training problems as well as a number of human errors that led to the shameful fiasco. Several officers were reprimanded and relieved of command as a result.

Kerry’s ruffled ostrich feathers

You’ve got to hand it to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for being consistent when it comes to his view of global terrorism. In Bangladesh on Monday, he reiterated his position to members of the press.

“Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much,” he said at a briefing at the Edward M. Kennedy Center in Dhaka. This way, he explained, “People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”

This was Kerry’s clumsy way of acknowledging that though the phenomenon exists, its individual perpetrators — who “decide one day … to be … terrorists and [are] willing to kill [themselves], and go out and kill some people, [in order to] make some noise” — should not be given a spotlight. Indeed, he said, “no country is immune” from the phenomenon, because “it’s easy to terrorize.”

In other words, since suicide bombers who slaughter innocent people are a dime a dozen, the best way to burst their publicity-seeking bubbles is to ignore them. Especially when there are more pressing matters to tackle, chief among them the weather. Yes, in the eyes of America’s top diplomat, climate change is what ought to be concerning the global community, and tackling it requires everyone’s undivided attention.

In June, Kerry went as far as to say that refrigerators and air conditioners are a threat on a par with mass murder. In Vienna to amend the 1987 Montreal Protocol that would phase out hydrofluorocarbons in household appliances, he announced, “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we … are doing here right now is of equal importance [to Islamic State and other terrorist groups], because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”

A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the State Department should turn over all materials related to allegations in a new think-tank report charging that Iran got secret exemptions in the nuclear deal to get the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action completed on schedule.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security report said “some nuclear stocks and facilities were not in accordance with JCPOA limits on Implementation Day, but in anticipation the Joint Commission had earlier and secretly exempted them from the JCPOA limits.”

“The exemptions and in one case, a loophole, involved the low enriched uranium (LEU) cap of 300 kilograms (kg), some of the near 20 percent LEU, the heavy water cap, and the number of large hot cells allowed to remain in Iran. One senior knowledgeable official stated that if the Joint Commission had not acted to create these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the JCPOA by Implementation Day,” wrote authors David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, and Andrea Stricker.

They added that the “secretive decision making process risks advantaging Iran by allowing it to try to systematically weaken the JCPOA. It appears to be succeeding in several key areas.”

“Given the technical complexity and public importance of the various JCPOA exemptions and loopholes, the administration’s policy to maintain secrecy interferes in the process of establishing adequate Congressional and public oversight of the JCPOA. This is particularly true concerning potentially agreement-weakening decisions by the Joint Commission. As a matter of policy, the United States should agree to any exemptions or loopholes in the JCPOA only if the decisions are simultaneously made public.”

The institute has remained neutral on whether or not the nuclear deal should have been implemented.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) called the revelations “yet another example of the administration’s false choice it presented to the American people in selling the flawed Iranian deal that provides the mullahs a patient pathway to the bomb.”

“The American public deserves answers from the administration, and I expect the State Department to release all relevant materials and to fully explain these allegations,” Gardner added.

State Department press secretary John Kirby told reporters today there was no loosening of the low-enriched uranium stockpile rule, insisting it “hasn’t changed; they’ve not exceeded that limit.”

“As many of you know, it’s written right in the JCPOA, which established the Joint Commission, that the work of the Joint Commission would be confidential,” Kirby said. “Unless the Joint Commission decided otherwise, and it’s right there in the JCPOA itself. And it’s designed that way.”

“…I also would assert that the Joint Commission has not and will not loosen any of the commitments and has not provide any exceptions that would allow Iran to retain or process material in excess of its JCPOA limits that it could use in a breakout scenario.”

Kirby said Congress “has been kept informed” of the commission’s work.

Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, was presented to the people of the United States—and, more broadly, to the people of the world—as the candidate best suited to play the role of unifier. President George W. Bush had been the Great Divider but now the time had come for everyone to put those discordant days behind us and embrace the one we had been waiting for, and so begin an era of repair and restoration. A sizeable proportion of Americans continue to approve of President Obama—close to 50 per cent in some polls—and yet the blistering populist campaigns pursued by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (and, in a sense, Ted Cruz) throughout the current presidential campaign season suggest that his time in office has increased discord in the country.

Barack Obama positioning himself as the Healer-in-Chief was always a problematic notion. Edward Klein’s The Amateur (2012) is vitriolic in tone and underestimates Obama’s political savvy, and yet his rationalisation of Obama’s original popular appeal—masterminded by political consultant David Axelrod—remains relevant:

[Axelrod] performed a brilliant piece of political legerdemain … He devised a narrative for Obama in which the candidate was presented as a black man who would heal America, not divide it, a moderate non-partisan who would rescue America, not threaten it.

Candidate Obama, the politician with the most radical voting record in the US Senate, could be trusted by mainstream America to bring the nation together.

President Obama has failed as national peacemaker because he is not a “centrist” or mediator. The provenance of his systematic worldview can be found in the thinkers of the New Left, from Frank Marshall Davis and Edward Said to Jeremiah Wright. The Reverend Wright’s “God damn America!” outburst encapsulates the New Left’s aversion to the fundamentals of America’s capitalist democracy. America is not to be healed so much as reconfigured. The great ideological fissure in the United States, then, is between their so-called libertarian-socialism—the “spirit of 1968” as Dinesh D’Souza has tagged it—and a revolution with far deeper roots: the “spirit of 1776”.

Edward Klein’s insight is only one explanation for why so many Americans failed to grasp the sharp nature of Barack Obama’s ideology. Not the least of these is that the forty-fourth president long ago took a leaf out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971). President Obama, in short, eschews the pitfalls of the “rhetorical radical”. He avoids the undisguised anger and belligerence common to many activists and, in its place, adopts the public persona of what Alinsky called the “radical realist”. This could be summed up in four words: Don’t frighten the horses. Thus, Barack Obama typically expresses himself with the poise and equanimity of a venerable conciliator, and yet a more contentious outlook is invariably at work.

Socrates is rumored to have said that the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing, and maybe we should adopt a version of the Greek philosopher’s motto when it comes to the nuclear deal with Iran. To wit, we are learning again that what the Obama Administration says Iran can do under the agreement, and what Iran is allowed to do, are almost never the same.

The latest discrepancy was revealed Thursday in a report by David Albright and Andrea Stricker of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a think tank in Washington D.C. that specializes in nuclear issues. The agreement specifies that Iran is to limit its stockpile of reactor-grade, low-enriched uranium (LEU) to no more than 300 kilograms for 15 years. Tehran shipped more than 11 tons of LEU to Russia last year, and the Administration has trumpeted the Islamic Republic’s supposed compliance with the deal as a way of justifying wider sanctions relief.

But as Mr. Albright and Ms. Stricker note, Iran‘s “compliance” came about thanks to a series of secretive exemptions and loopholes that the Administration and the deal’s other signatories created for the mullahs sometime last year. Had those exemptions and loopholes not been created out of thin air, the authors report, “some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance” with the deal.

Among the exemptions: Iran was allowed to keep more than 300 kilos of low-enriched uranium provided it was in various “waste forms.” The deal was also supposed to cap Iran’s production of heavy water at 130 tons, but another loophole now allows Iran to exceed that. In a third exemption, Iran was allowed to maintain 19 large radiation containment chambers, or hot cells, which are supposed to be used for producing medical isotopes but can be “misused for secret, mostly small-scale plutonium separation efforts.”

The White House has waved off the ISIS report by insisting it “did not and will not allow Iran to skirt” its commitments. The non-denial would be more credible if the Administration hadn’t last year agreed to a secretive process in which Iran was allowed to inspect its own nuclear-related military facilities.

Donald J. Trump met today with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and later flies to Arizona for a much- anticipated speech on immigration. On these and similar occasions, it would behoove the Republican presidential nominee to go beyond the usual concerns about Mexican and Central American migrants crossing America’s southern “border.” Trump should focus, privately and publicly, on what U.S. officials call “Other Than Mexicans.”

OTMs consist of all sorts of people who break into the United States from countries all around the world. These include such colorful locales as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

In fact, federal agents in 2014 apprehended 4,930 individuals who hailed from the four nations that Washington listed as “state sponsors of terrorism,” plus the ten countries that the Transportation Safety Administration had designated as “of interest.” Foreigners who arrive legally from those places are subject to enhanced passenger screening. A total of 69,599 people from those 14 countries were arrested while trying to enter America illegally, from fiscal years 2005 through 2014, according to the 2014 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, published this month by the Department of Homeland Security.

While these figures involve all of America’s frontiers, among the 486,651 illegal aliens caught entering the United States, 479,371 (or 98.5 percent) were nailed along the southern Boundary. It probably is safe to assume that a similar proportion of illegal aliens from these worrisome nations also were captured waltzing in from Mexico.

An American Muslim who investigated the historical evidence for Islam and Christianity discovered an astounding truth: the evidence is “entirely incompatible” with Islam, while it supports the three greatest arguments for Christianity.

“It was not just that history did not support the traditional narratives of Islam, but rather that history proved to be entirely incompatible with Islamic origins,” writes Nabeel Qureshi (emphasis his), author of the book No God But One: Allah or Jesus? A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam & Christianity. The book, released Tuesday, provides a deep investigation of the key differences between the two faiths and delves into the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for each.

Qureshi investigates five basic claims, each disputed by either side. He asks the question of whether there is enough evidence that “an objective observer” would conclude in favor of Christianity or Islam. The arguments for Christianity: that Jesus died on the cross, that his disciples believed he rose from the dead, and that he claimed to be God. The arguments for Islam: that Muhammad is a prophet of Allah, and that the Quran is inspired by Allah.

As the Quran is the “why” of the Islamic faith, I will begin there, and move to Muhammad. Then, I will dive into Qureshi’s arguments for Christianity.
1. Is the Quran the word of God?

The Quran is more important to Muslims than the Bible is to Christians — so much so that burning the Quran invites anger and even violence, while no one riots when the Bible is burnt. Qureshi lays out five common arguments for the inspiration of the Quran: its literary excellence, its fulfilled prophecies, the miraculous scientific knowledge in the text, mathematical marvels, and the perfect preservation of the book across the centuries.

Most of these arguments come down to a subjective twisting of the Quranic text. Many so-called prophecies are quoted out of context, and the one clear prophecy was predictable and took too long to occur. The miraculous scientific knowledge is also used out of context, and relies on rejecting specific scientific statements which have been proven false. Finally, in order to argue for mathematical wonders in the text, Muslims have to reject the rules of Arabic grammar and discard entire verses from the Quran.

This draws the literary excellence of the Quran into doubt. Qureshi quotes the scholar Gerd Puin, an expert on the Arabic of the Quran: “Every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense.” At every turn, when a challenger would attack the literary excellence of the text, Muslims would redefine the test to protect it from scrutiny. In the end, this claim to literary excellence is subjective — it will not convince someone who does not already believe it.

Finally, the history of the Quran is fraught with mistakes. Qureshi tells the story of the Caliph Uthman (ruled 644-655 A.D.), who recalled all Quranic manuscripts, burned them all, and issued official, standardized copies. Records of dissenting Muslims persist to this day.

Also, when the Quran — which was originally oral — was first being written down, some chapters were nearly lost, and great reciters of the Quran such as Ubay and Abdullah ibn Masud (who was named by Muhammad as one of the four best teachers of the Quran) disagreed with the final written text. Some of the Muslim world still has Qurans with readings different from the best known version, which was promulgated in 1924 – the Royal Cairo Edition.
2. Is Muhammad the prophet of God?

The Shahada, or Islamic statement of faith, is one of the five pillars of Islam, and it declares, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” Qureshi listed three main arguments for Muhammad’s prophethood: his excellent life and character, Bible prophecies about him, and miraculous scientific knowledge.

As stated above, the claims to scientific knowledge are very problematic. One particular section in the Quran which Muslims argue to be uniquely ahead of its time deals with embryology — how a baby develops in the womb. Yet the terms in the verses are far from scientific, and the requisite knowledge long predates Muhammad: Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals is more scientific and detailed, and came 1,000 years before Islam. Also, the Greek scientist Galen shows a similarly nuanced scientific description clearer than Muhammad’s.

The Bible prophecies that Muslims claim to be about Muhammad are clearly about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, when studied in context. In Deuteronomy 18, God promises to lift up “a prophet from among their brethren,” which Muslims interpret as meaning “from the tribe of the brother of Isaac, i.e. Ishmael.” But the text in question clearly refers to the Israelites, and the word translated “brethren” means “countrymen.” Indeed, a section right before this promise explicitly differentiates between foreigners and Israelites. This verse promises a Jewish prophet, not an Ismaelite one.