February 2, 2024: White House Declares Mullahs Innocent... Again!

The think tank of Iranian asset Robert Malley is also an Iranian asset; A four-month pause in Gaza?; More on the FAA

The Big Story

In Tuesday’s Big Story, we covered the Biden administration’s then-ongoing “investigation” into the question of Iran’s responsibility for the killing of three Americans by an Iranian proxy militia on Sunday. It was, if you believed White House messaging, a whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie. On Monday, for instance, The New York Times quoted a “senior American official” who “cautioned that analysts were still gathering and evaluating the information available to determine whether Iran ordered a more aggressive attack or a militia group decided to do so on its own.”

We could barely stand the suspense. After all, if it turned out that Tehran was responsible for killing Americans, the White House might have to not only rethink its pro-Iran policy but also—horror of horrors—do something to deter Iran, which—again if you believe White House messaging—might put the United States on the path to “war.” True, the administration had had a run of fantastic luck. More than 30 Americans were killed by an Iranian proxy on Oct. 7, and U.S. Navy warships in the Red Sea have been under attack by an Iranian proxy for months. But each time, U.S. intelligence managed to turn up “exquisite” information (which it could never share with the public) showing that Iran had no “direct” knowledge of any “specific” attacks by its clients. Maybe this would be the time that the administration’s luck ran out?

Just kidding. On Thursday, “two U.S. officials familiar with the matter” leaked to Politico that “intelligence officials have calculated that Iran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East.” Wow. You don’t say? They’re probably just as angry about what happened in Jordan as we are.

The report goes on:

The Quds Force—an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps—is responsible for sending weapons and military advisers as well as intelligence to support militias in Iraq and Syria as well as the Houthis in Yemen. The groups have varying ambitions and agendas, which sometimes overlap, but Tehran does not appear to have complete authority over their operational decision-making, the officials said.

That’s right: the IRGC’s external operations branch may send money and weapons to various constituents of the Axis of Resistance and host joint training exercises for them in Iran and set up command-and-control infrastructure to coordinate their actions and dispatch high-level officers and advisers to provide them with real-time battlefield intelligence and target selection; it may do all that, but it doesn’t have “complete authority” over their “operational decision-making.” When the Kata’ib Hezbollah suicide drone operator needs to take a leak, he doesn’t have to ask permission from the IRGC, understand? 

Indeed, the resistance groups have “varying ambitions and agendas.” For instance, Hamas is more concerned with killing Jews in Gaza and southern Israel. Hezbollah wants to kill Jews in northern Israel. And Kata’ib Hezbollah wants to kill Americans in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan first and leave the Jews for later. Trying to get these guys to work together is like herding cats!

More Politico:

While the disclosure means it may be particularly hard to predict what actions these groups will take, it also could lower the chance of the U.S. getting pulled into a direct confrontation with Iran. Any indication that Tehran was directly involved in ordering or overseeing the attacks would make U.S. retaliation against Iran more likely.

We hate to be the ones to tell you this, but the truth is even scarier than Iranian responsibility: It may be “particularly hard to predict what actions these groups will take.” They’re crazy, like the Joker. Maybe they’ll hit Iran next. Or China? Who knows?

Oh, and while the United States was conducting its no-doubt extremely thorough investigation into Sunday’s attack, the Pentagon issued a series of public statements on its plans to “retaliate” against Iranian proxy targets in Iraq and Syria … any day now, with one U.S. official telling CBS Thursday that “weather will be a major factor in the timing”—since apparently our $317 million-per-unit B1 Lancers can’t fly when it’s cloudy. The weather must have been clear Friday night though, since U.S. officials confirmed just before The Scroll published that the Air Force had struck between 8 and 12 Iran-linked sites in Iraq and eastern Syria.   

That’s nice, except… on Friday morning, Tammuz Intel reported on X that “all Iran-backed proxies’ HQs and positions” in Iraq “were cleared days ago” and that “all Iran-backed senior commanders are [now] in their hideouts.” 

We’re sure that’s just one more in a mounting series of incredible coincidences.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Liel Leibovitz on ‘The Book of Clarence,’ a preachy, muddled, incoherent, messy, and funny epistle about faith

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The Rest

→Speaking of Iran and Team Obama-Biden: In 2016, the International Crisis Group (ICG) signed a secret memorandum of understanding for a “research-cooperation agreement” with the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), an Iranian government think tank that staged a Holocaust denial conference in 2006, Semafor’s Jay Solomon reports. The previously unreported MOU was part of a much larger pattern of cooperation between the ICG and the Iranian government during negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal. In his memoir, former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif claimed that a 2014 ICG report that served as a framework for the final deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was based on a “draft devised by the Iranian delegation”—a claim the ICG denies. 

ICG experts were also at the heart of the Iranian influence operation uncovered by Semafor in September 2023, whose central figure was ICG’s former Middle East director and later president, Robert Malley. Malley served as Barack Obama’s “point man” for the Middle East during the JCPOA negotiations and in 2021 was appointed as Biden’s Iran envoy, a role in which he served until being suspended in June 2023 after the State Department revoked his security clearance for mishandling classified documents. 

The ICG has denied doing anything illegal or accepting any funding from Tehran. “But,” as Solomon writes:

… these arrangements are even more notable given that Crisis Group’s former president, Robert Malley, joined the White House in January 2021 to become its chief negotiator with Tehran on the nuclear issue. The diplomat went from leading an organization that Tehran saw as a critical interlocutor with the world to representing America’s interests against it, in just a matter of months.

As The Scroll reported last week, Malley is teaching a class on the Israel-Palestine conflict this semester at Yale. 

Read the rest of the Semafor report here: https://www.semafor.com/article/02/02/2024/how-iran-used-its-ties-to-a-top-global-ngo

→The hostage deal under consideration by the Israeli security cabinet includes a 142-day pause in fighting, according to a Friday report in Haaretz. According to sources who took part in a Thursday-night security meeting, the deal includes an initial 35-day pause, during which Hamas would release one elderly, sick, or female hostage per day, and then a week for negotiating the release of the remaining 100 hostages at a rate of one hostage per day. According to Haartez, the proposed deal faced “significant criticism” from “several” members of the security cabinet, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that Israel cannot agree to end the war or to withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned on Friday that any cease-fire with Hamas will not apply to Hezbollah and the northern border. 

→Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney, admitted in a Friday court filing that she was in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade at the time she hired him as a special prosecutor in her RICO case against Donald Trump. The filing, which arrived just in time for the Friday deadline set by Judge Scott McAfee, was Willis’ first public comment since allegations of her relationship with Wade surfaced in a Jan. 8 court filing by Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for defendant Michael Roman. Merchant also charged that Wade had used public funds earned through his work on the case to pay for the couple’s vacations to Napa Valley and Aruba while concealing the income from his ex-wife. Willis and Wade are expected to testify at a Feb. 15 evidentiary hearing. 

→In our Jan. 16 Big Story, we mentioned a 2014 initiative by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to hire more minority air-traffic controllers (ATCs) by scrapping a standardized test, the AT-SAT, and replacing it with a non-validated “biographical assessment” that awarded candidates points for, among other things, earning poor grades in high-school science and having a recent history of unemployment. For the past two weeks, X user @TracingWoodgrains has been digging through court documents from Brigida v. U.S. Department of Transportation, a class-action lawsuit challenging the FAA’s use of the assessment. He’s confirmed our and others’ reporting about the case and also turned up some additional entertaining/alarming details:

• The biographical assessment was intentionally designed to fail 90% of applicants so that the FAA could “purge” graduates of the Air-Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative, who were disproportionately white. 

• Prior to the adoption of the biographical assessment, Shelton Snow, an FAA employee and president of the Washington Suburban chapter of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), distributed a list of “buzzwords” to NBCFAE members that would “automatically push their résumés to the top of the file.”

• After the assessment was implemented at the urging of the NBCFAE, Snow organized a teleconference for NBCFAE applicants in which he gave them the correct answers to the test. The FAA later investigated Snow, confirming that he had helped NBCFAE members cheat on the test (which Snow initially denied) but clearing him of “doing anything wrong” because the charges did not “warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor.”

• According to one whistleblower, employees from the FAA’s Human Resources department organized a “résumé clinic” for NBCFAE applicants in which the FAA employees directly assisted the applicants in filling out the application and provided them with “buzzwords” to include on their résumés. 

Congress passed a law banning the use of the biographical assessment in 2016, but ATC staffing has not recovered since the initial changes to the hiring process were announced in December 2013. Here’s a chart of the number of certified ATCs in the United States, from a 2023 report from the National Airspace System Safety Review Team, which warned that “there are 1,002 fewer fully certified air-traffic controllers in August 2023 than in August 2012”:

You can take the FAA’s biographical assessment yourself here: ​​https://kaisoapbox.github.io/faa_biographical_assessment/ 

→Spotify has reached a new $250 million deal with podcaster Joe Rogan, which will see the streaming giant promoting his content on YouTube and other platforms. It may seem like a distant memory now, but after signing Rogan to an initial $100 million deal in May 2020, the company faced years of near-constant pressure from employees, celebrities, outside lobby groups, and the White House to deplatform or censor Rogan over sins such as “transphobia” and COVID-19 “disinformation.” Among those caught up in the moral panic was the musician Neil Young, who removed his entire music catalog from Spotify in January 2022 and hasn’t allowed it back on. As we’re otherwise big fans of Neil, we’ll end with a relevant-seeming song of his to take you into the weekend:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Coming Together in the Bronx, by Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman

A lesson I learned as a child still resonates in the aftermath of the Hamas attack: In the wake of tragedy, Jews often return to our faith and our community.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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'The Book of Clarence' Is a Raw, Funny Epistle About Faith

What begins as a Black 'Life of Brian' becomes a wonderful, confusing banquet that puts dull Hollywood box-tickers to shame

by Liel Leibovitz

There are many, many reasons not to like The Book of Clarence, the new movie from musician-turned-filmmaker Jeymes Samuel.

Despite taking place in Jerusalem in the year 33 CE and dealing exclusively with religion, no one in the film even once identifies as Jewish. Instead, the all-Black cast delivers a shambolic tale that, as one critic sagely put it, “plays like Ben-Hur by way of Friday.” Or, rather, part of the film does: What begins as a fun tale of Clarence, a minor hustler dealing lingonweed and pining for the ladies, while Buju Banton and Shabba Ranks groove on the soundtrack, soon veers hard into much murkier existential turf. Clarence the sinner finds Jesus—literally—but not, you see, the literal Jesus of the Gospels, because Clarence’s Jesus is a badass who can stop the stones aimed at Mary Magdalen midair, like Neo did with bullets in The Matrix. Oh, and there’s another Jesus, too, who is white and played by Benedict Cumberbatch and beloved by all because, as one passerby puts it not too subtly, “he’s so pure and white and so trustworthy.”

Does this sound like a preachy, muddled, incoherent, flagrant mess? Sure! But so, if we’re being honest about it, is the very idea of faith.

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How do you make a movie about faith? If hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings, faith is more like a hairless cat that skulks around the heart, compelling but not cute, a creature that, by its very existence, begs the question “why.” Why do we believe there’s something when we can see nothing? And why engage seriously with a way of being in the world that advertises, at the very outset of things, that it can offer absolutely no concrete evidence to guide us on our way?

Traditionally, artists have tackled this question in one of two ways. Some, like George Stevens, opted for excessive, oppressive, performative sincerity. How else to tell The Greatest Story Ever Told but in a mammoth movie that, despite a run time of three hours and 19 minutes found no room for levity, wonder, or joy? “God is unlucky,” one writer quipped after sitting through that big blockbuster of 1965; “His only begotten son turns out to be a bore.”

There’s nothing boring about Ernst Toller, who is played by Ethan Hawke and is the protagonist of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, a master class in how to make another kind of faith film. Toller is a pastor plagued by doubt and guilt, and a tight and heartbreaking human drama unfurling in his pews helps make his very internal struggle visible, palpable, and raw. This is the subgenre of faith journey as therapy, where the dysfunctional relationship isn’t with a spouse but with God. It works, but it still feels idiosyncratic, because no matter how moving the pastor’s realizations are, they’re his own, not ours. Making a film about one person’s struggle with faith is a reasonable undertaking; but how do you make a movie about faith writ large? How do you capture the feeling itself on screen?

That’s the question Samuel tries to answer in The Book of Clarence. He fails—heroically, gloriously, gallantly—but his failure is more instructive than 10 taut biblical epics.

When we first meet Clarence, played by the always exquisite LaKeith Stanfield, he is quick to offer his mantra: Knowledge is stronger than belief. He tells it to John the Baptist, who delivers an endearing and hilarious response, and to the Virgin Mary, who offers miraculous tales of her boy ripped straight from the Apocrypha. But Clarence isn’t having any of it. He owes Jedediah the Terrible a bunch of money, and Jedediah did not earn his moniker by turning the other cheek. He’s also in love with Jedediah’s sister, Varinia, another good reason to hatch a get-rich-quick scheme. And because his twin brother, Thomas, had upped and left to become a disciple of that Nazarene dude getting real well known, Clarence decides that there’s no business like the Messiah business. He pronounces himself the Redeemer, performs a few silly tricks in the marketplace, and, presto, he’s flush with fame and cash.

Are you getting strong Life of Brian vibes? Expecting hilarity to ensue as Clarence sends up our musty pieties in delightful one-liners that reek of weed and Nietzsche? Forget it, Jack, this is Jerusalem: With a thousand silver shekels in his rucksack, Clarence is rolling merrily along, on his way to pay off his debts and buy his mother a nice new home. But then he sees the slaves in the marketplace, and something clicks—Clarence the dealer, Clarence the doubter, Clarence the doomed rises to the occasion and, for the first time in his life, does the right thing.

There’s no point describing what happens next. Walking on water, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and the Last Supper all make an appearance, but none are instructive, or even terribly sensible, because the plot cheerfully refuses to cohere. One moment we’re at a night club, getting down with some dance moves punctuated by old-timey effects; the next, we’re staring at Clarence’s anguished face, a scene as bloody and as haunting as anything Mel Gibson inflicted on his Christ. There are great jokes and rousing speeches and glib bursts of hammy political grandstanding and tiny moments of human compassion and no warning whatsoever that the tone’s about to change. It’s like going to a restaurant and being offered sashimi, chicken tikka masala, and a McFlurry for dessert—you may be horrified, but are you really complaining?

Hallelujah to that! Because The Book of Clarence makes two essential points.

The first is that art doesn’t have to make a point. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to be. Its job is to convey the feeling of one human being to another, which is just about the most difficult and miraculous undertaking on this planet. There’s more truth and beauty in one “she loves you, yeah yeah yeah” than there is in the sunken and turgid sophistry of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. And there’s never any doubt as to what Clarence is feeling, because Clarence is a guy, not an ideological bot weaponized to deliver a drab and deadly payload of virtue signaling.

It’s hard to remember this after more than a decade of cinematic misery, but movies don’t have to be the celluloid equivalent of an anxious undergrad’s term paper written entirely to tickle some dim teacher’s biases. They don’t have to make stump speeches or pretend to be stunning and brave by doing little else but modulating the melanin level on screen. They simply have to make us feel something. The Book of Clarence does, in spades, and the feeling it focuses on is the notoriously finicky one of faith.

Which brings us to the second, and major, reason for the strange, broken-down greatness of The Book of Clarence. Like his accidental hero, Samuel, too, wants to know what faith is, and like Clarence, he is also too honest to pull off a few tricks and call himself a savior. Sometimes, he knows, faith is romantic, even erotic, as we acknowledge every Friday afternoon by welcoming Shabbat with "Lecha Dodi," a poem imagining God as a beloved bridegroom and all of us as his eagerly awaiting bride. Sometimes faith is frustrating, a dull sensation we feel on those many cold mornings when we pray with the best of intentions but feel very far from our Creator. Sometimes, faith is just doubt in an overcoat—doubt, as G.K. Chesterton wisely observed, being a sensation that’s of no use to anyone but those most eager to believe. Sometimes faith is bluster, which you know if you’ve gone to a progressive house of worship and were treated to talk of transgenderism or climate change rather than the word of God. Faith can happen in grand, sweeping moments of conversion and elation, in shul or on the road to Damascus. But it’s just as present in that small smile you exchange with your child around the Shabbat dinner table, with the challah beckoning and the candles burning bright and nothing bigger happening than a moment of family bliss.

These sensations have little in common. A scientist would have a hard time fitting them together into some orderly taxonomy. But it’s precisely this fluidity, this thin, wild mercury sensation that makes faith sustaining, intoxicating, essential. It’s this insight that moved Walt Whitman, the closest thing America has had to a prophet, to cheerfully dismiss his inherent contradictions. “I am large,” he ruled, “I contain multitudes.”

We all do, but we need someone to free us—from too much doubt or too much dogma, from deadened attachments and irrational fears, from everything that makes us not see the mysteries of creation that unfurl each day all around us. Knowledge, Clarence reassures us as his book comes to an end, is stronger than belief. But this time, he’s speaking as a man who cried and sneered and blasphemed and prayed his way into belief and now stands firmly on a much higher peak, looking down on creation with certainty and humility and joy. In short, he’s speaking as a man of faith. And we’re right there with him, bewildered and moved, confounded and amused, clueless but ready to change.