July 26: Kamala Knifes Israel

Bibi meets with Trump; Paris Olympics sabotaged; "No Genocide Josh"

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The Big Story

Vice President Kamala Harris—who now appears to be acting as president, despite her formal title—met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday evening to discuss a potential Israeli deal with Hamas that would bring the war in Gaza to a close. After the meeting, she (not Biden) gave a short press conference addressing the nation, which you can watch for yourself here:

We’ve seen several pro-Israel voices on social media attempting to claim victory from Harris’ “nuanced” remarks. And indeed, Harris said some of the right things. She reiterated her support for Israel’s right to self-defense (including against Iran), blamed Hamas (a “brutal terrorist organization”) for starting the war, and went on to read the names of all of the U.S. hostages held in Gaza. That was the good part. 

Then there was the rest. Kamala continued:

I also expressed to the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity. What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent. 

She went on to say that “it is time for this war to end” and told “everyone who has been calling for a cease-fire” that “I see you and I hear you.” The “war in Gaza is not a binary issue,” Harris said, and she called on Americans to “acknowledge the complexity, the nuance, and the history of the region.” She also expressed her support for a “path forward that can lead to a two-state solution.” 

Israeli officials were apparently concerned by Harris’ remarks. The Times of Israel quoted one anonymous official, who said of Harris’ remarks, “Is the harm to Palestinian civilians really the problem right now? What is Hamas supposed to think when it hears this?” The same official worried that Hamas would interpret Harris’ remarks as signaling increased “daylight” between the U.S. and Israeli positions, thereby making a hostage deal harder to secure. 

But we’d like to pause for a moment on Harris’ closing remarks. She ended her brief address by speaking out against nonspecific “hate”:

Let us all condemn terrorism and violence. Let us all do what we can to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians. And let us condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hate of any kind. 

Who could object to opposing “hate of any kind”? Well, as Jacob Siegel wrote in his Thursday essay for Tablet, “Learn This Term: ‘Whole of Society’”:

Herding Jews into the whole-of-society embrace is a useful way to turn nominally Jewish institutions—which here includes the Anti-Defamation League, which advised and endorsed the administration’s whole-of-society national strategy—into controlled subsidiaries of the party, while wresting control over the “Jewish narrative.” Thus the constant need to invoke Islamophobia every time evidence of antisemitism is presented. By erasing Jewish particularity and conflating all kinds of bigotry in an indistinguishable beige of generic “hate,” the party shuts up demands that it actually do something about anti-Jewish violence—something that only racist Islamophobes see as a specifically Jewish issue. At the same time it justifies expansive, blunt-force interventions into institutions across the entire society, since they are all supposedly equally susceptible to promoting hate and extremism if they are allowed to operate outside of the party-state’s surveillance apparatus.

Over and over again, the answer to the generic category of hate is increased regulation and censorship of social media. Under the auspices of coordinating between the corporate and civic sector, activist groups aligned with party interests are used to monitor powerful corporations, especially in the tech sector. Protecting Jews from hate, in other words, demands granting the party-state more power to reward allies and punish political opponents.

Siegel also points out that the origin of “whole of society” efforts to counter “hate” lies in the Obama administration’s paradigm of “countering violent extremism,” or CVE, as a substitute for the Bush-era paradigm of the war on terror. As Siegel writes:

A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the war on terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama’s nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a whole-of-society progressive cause by redirecting its instruments—most notably mass surveillance—against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.

So, on the one hand, you get the destructive witch hunts for supposed “violent extremists” in the U.S. military, which failed to find extremists but did succeed in creating “widespread polarization and division in the ranks,” according to a December 2023 report from the Pentagon (see our Jan. 3 edition); the Department of Justice labeling parents “domestic extremists” for protesting at school board meetings; and the military labeling pro-life nonprofits as “terrorist groups” in training slides (see our July 11 edition). On the other hand, the Democratic Party can integrate organizations connected to Hamas and the international Muslim Brotherhood, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Students for Justice in Palestine, into its party machinery as designated representatives of the “Muslim community,” on the logic that “hate” and “extremism” have no religion. As Harris explained in recently resurfaced remarks to the Islamic Center of Southern California in 2016:

We must have the courage to object when they use that term radical Islamic terrorism, which ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror.

Thus are victims and perpetrators made equal in the “nuanced” world of the war on hate. Just don’t protest too loudly, or you might find yourself labeled a hater too. 

Read the rest of the essay here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Iran wants to kill former Trump administration officials. Why isn’t the Secret Service protecting them? Judith Miller investigates.

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The Rest

→Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago on Friday. The former president appeared eager to bury the hatchet with Bibi, with whom he clashed in 2021 over Netanyahu’s failure to endorse his claims of election fraud. Speaking after the meeting, Trump said he’s “always had a very good relationship” with the Israeli prime minister. The former president and Republican nominee also criticized Harris’ remarks on Thursday evening as “disrespectful to Israel,” adding, “I actually don’t know how a person who’s Jewish can vote for her. But that’s up to them.”

→High-speed trains across France were sabotaged Friday in a series of coordinated arson attacks timed to the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The fires, which affected three high-speed rail lines heading in and out of Paris, were set in pipes carrying the cables used for train signaling, in what French Transportation Minister Patrice Vergriete has called a “criminal” attack. French authorities have not identified any suspects or the motive behind the attacks, but on Friday, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz claimed on X that they were “planned and executed under the influence of Iran’s axis of evil and radical Islam,” citing undisclosed “information held by Israel” about an Iranian plan to attack the Olympic Games. 

→Early reports suggest that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is one of the leading candidates to become Harris’ running mate, and for good reason: He’s a popular swing-state governor who successfully ran as a moderate in 2022. There’s just one problem: He’s Jewish and a vocal supporter of Israel. Jewish Insider reports that a recently launched far-left website, which appears to be run by activists from the Democratic Socialists of America, the Uncommitted movement, and the Dear White Staffers Instagram account, is organizing a “No Genocide Josh” campaign designed to scuttle the pick. According to a messaging document obtained by Jewish Insider, the group is arguing that a “VP Pick with anti-Palestinian and pro-war views will depress turnout among Muslim, Arab-American, and young voters.” An article in The New Republic earlier this week concurred, warning that picking Shapiro would “ruin Democratic unity” and that the governor’s criticisms of anti-Israel protesters “call into question his basic commitment to First Amendment rights.”

→On Wednesday, U.S. and Canadian fighters intercepted a joint Chinese-Russian bomber patrol off the Alaskan coast. In a sign of growing Chinese-Russian military cooperation, two Russian TU-95 Bears and two Chinese H-6 bombers, flanked by a fighter escort, took off from an airbase in Siberia and entered the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, a buffer zone that is not a part of U.S. airspace. The bombers come within 200 miles of the Alaskan coast, where they were met by U.S. and Canadian fighter jets. In a Thursday press conference, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed that the patrol was “the first time we’ve seen the two countries fly together like that.” Last August, The Wall Street Journal notes, a joint Chinese-Russian naval flotilla patrolled near the Aleutian islands, though it avoided entering U.S. territorial waters.

→The crash of a $450 million B-1B Lancer at an Air Force base in South Dakota earlier this year was due to crew failures and an “unhealthy organizational culture that permitted degradation of airmanship skills,” according to a new Air Force crash investigation reported by Military.com. The Jan. 4 crash occurred when the crew accidentally stalled the aircraft while attempting to land it, but one of the lead investigators, Col. Erick Lord, blamed their failure on the 34th Bomb Squadron’s “overall lack of discipline, inadequate focus on basic airmanship skills, and failure to properly identify and mitigate risk.” The report also notes that one of the airplane’s crew members, who was injured while ejecting during the crash, weighed 260 pounds—15 pounds over the Air Force’s recommended weight and nearly 50 pounds over the ejection seat’s recommended weight. 

In September 2022, as part of its DEI push, the Air Force instituted a policy to count up to only 60 hours of prior pilot instruction or flying time as part of its Pilot Candidate Selection Method, on the grounds that rewarding real-life flying experience discriminated against Black and Hispanic candidates. “So what we did was, you still get a little bit of credit for your time, but not as much as it used to be,” Charles Q. Brown Jr., then the Air Force chief of staff and now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Defense One at the time. “Some of our airmen have talent. They just don’t have the financial means to boost their score.”

→Earlier this week, the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, led an Israeli delegation on a visit to India to “promote strategic dialogue and strengthen defense cooperation” between the two countries. According to a report in Israel National News, Zamir met with the “Director General of the Indian Ministry of Defense, the Indian Chief of Staff, and the heads of the Indian Army’s security arms” while in India; he also hosted an “Israeli-Indian Industries Forum,” designed to “enhance the potential for industrial-defense cooperation” between Israel and India. As Tablet has previously reported—and despite oft-repeated claims of Israel’s “diplomatic isolation”—Israeli relations with the world’s largest democracy are flourishing, with India now accounting for 46% of Israel’s weapons exports, more than the exports from the United States. 

Read more here. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Nabokov’s Love Affair, by Shalom Goldman

The greatest English-language novelist of the 20th century was also an outstanding Russian philosemite

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Iran Is Still Trying to Kill American Officials

Why is the Biden administration refusing to protect them?

by Judith Miller

Donald Trump’s recent brush with death at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania has refocused attention on the vulnerability of current and former senior U.S. government officials to assassination plots, including those by the Islamic Republic of Iran. While there is no evidence that the Pennsylvania shooter, Thomas Crooks, was acting on behalf of Iran or any other foreign government, the Biden administration stated in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt that there had been an uptick in Iranian threats against the former president. At a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing on Monday, U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle evaded questions about whether the Secret Service had repeatedly denied the Trump campaign additional security during that same time period. She resigned the next day.

Iran has repeatedly threatened former senior Trump administration officials, citing their supposed role in the 2020 strike that killed Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, the No. 2 official in Iran. Posting on Twitter at the time, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed that those who had murdered General Soleimani and who had helped kill him would be punished: “This revenge will certainly happen at the right time.”

In January 2023, a social media account in Iran affiliated with the regime posted mock mugshots of 26 current and former U.S. officials, including National Security Council officials from the Trump administration Robert Greenway, Victoria Coates, and Matthew Pottinger, calling them “most wanted fugitives.” “There is no night that we sleep without thinking about you ...,” the post stated. “Revenge is near. Very near!”

That same month, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) posted a video on a social media site explicitly threatening some 15 former Trump administration officials—including Greenway, Coates, and Pottinger—with imminent assassination “by drone, sniper fire, bomb, lethal injection, or stabbing.”

These former officials appealed for help to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Their letter to Garland, which they sent a full 18 months ago, remains unacknowledged, they confirmed. “We thought long and hard before writing that letter, and even longer before going public with the lack of a response,” said Pottinger, a former assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser. Pottinger was not added to Iran’s blacklist until 2022 after a Yahoo News article falsely claimed in 2021 that he had participated in the 2020 drone strike. (Pottinger tried hard to persuade Yahoo News to correct its false story, which the news outlet refused to do. Yahoo News’ former editor did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)

The 26 former U.S. government officials are hardly the most senior officials who have been threatened by Iran. Topping what U.S. officials informally call Iran’s long-standing “kill list” is Donald Trump, along with several of his former senior officials—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspel, Special Envoy for Iran Brian Hook, then U.S. Central Command Commander General (Retired) Frank McKenzie, who was in charge of the Soleimani operation, and National Security advisers John Bolton and Robert O’Brien.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that Cheatle had ended government protection for O’Brien, despite continuing Iranian threats against him. Administration officials did not respond to emails asking why O’Brien’s security detail had been curtailed last August, or why they had not offered such protection to three other former officials targeted by Iran.

Pottinger said that he and his former colleagues had finally decided to go public about their security concerns only after it came out that the government had ended O’Brien’s protection.

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Greenway, Coates, and Pottinger know all too well the murder and mayhem of which the Islamic Republic is capable. As of August 2022, the Islamic Republic has assassinated at least 20 opponents abroad and killed hundreds—Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Israelis, and Arabs, as well as Iranian opposition members abroad—in bombings of foreign military, diplomatic, and cultural facilities. There have been at least 52 such attacks or plots since then, their letter states.

Iran, of course, was busy killing its enemies long before Soleimani’s death. Like other authoritarian, revolutionary governments, the Islamic Republic assembled a list of dissidents and other individuals deemed to be dangerous to the regime soon after coming to power in 1979. Iran’s first documented overseas assassination took place just outside Washington, D.C. In July 1980, Iranian agents recruited David Belfield (aka Dawud Salahuddin), an American convert to Shiite Islam, to kill former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian exile and former press attache to the Iranian Embassy in Washington during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In July 1980, Tabatabai was shot and killed in front of his home in Bethesda, Maryland.

Iranian plots have become more daring over time. In October 2011, Iran tried to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir at the Café Milano restaurant in Washington and then bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies. U.S. officials uncovered the plot they called Operation Red Coalition and subsequently charged two Iranian nationals with recruiting narco-trafficking criminals to do the job. After the plot was foiled, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress it showed that “some Iranian officials—probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei”—had “changed their calculus” and were now “more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

In an interview, Greenway, an assistant to former President Trump for the Middle East and now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that while Iran usually tied its vows for revenge to the Soleimani strike, he doubted that the death of the No. 2 official of Iran was what motivated the regime. Under Trump, he said, Iran had struggled under the toughest economic sanctions ever implemented. “There were 492 different discreet measures and quarterly evaluations to test their effectiveness,” he said. “Nothing like it had ever been attempted in our history.”

The regime stepped up assassination efforts overseas after Soleimani’s assassination in 2020 and especially after Trump left office.

Tehran’s enhanced aggression was hardly a secret. Citing the killing of Soleimani, Iran asked Interpol in January 2021, to issue a "red notice" ordering its members to arrest President Trump and 47 other U.S. officials. Among them were Coates and Greenway, who later wrote the letter appealing for protection.

While Justice Department officials told NBC, which first disclosed the existence of the officials’ letter, that they had referred it to another unspecified agency, they did not explain why they had never notified them or personally responded to the letter.

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Pottinger said that he had not received what the FBI called a “duty to warn” briefing about any new threats to him in the wake of the latest threat to President Trump. But he said he and his former colleagues remained concerned about possible danger to themselves and their families since Iran has never rescinded its threats. Salman Rushdie, he noted, was nearly stabbed to death in New York more than 30 years after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei issued his infamous fatwa calling for his death.

Greenway, too, expressed concern, noting that his email was hacked by Iranian actors in late 2022. The FBI had helped him resolve the hack, he said, which was aimed at obtaining digital information Iran could use to track his movements and location.

Greenway said he thought that the administration had not responded to their letter because the officials negotiating with Iran to renew the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, (JCPOA) had not wanted to call greater attention to Tehran’s ongoing assassination plots and disruption efforts.

The Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump abandoned ultimately failed. But the administration nevertheless relaxed the enforcement of sanctions, allowing China to buy millions of barrels of oil and replenish its coffers with an estimated $80 billion. Iran has also supplied drones to Russia to use against Ukraine.

The administration’s efforts to persuade Iran to reenter the nuclear deal were briefly sidetracked last year by a Justice Department investigation of its chief envoy to Tehran. Robert Malley, whom Biden had tasked with reviving the nuclear talks, quietly had his security clearance revoked last year before ultimately being suspended. The FBI is currently investigating him for mishandling classified information. As Tablet reported last year, Malley may have also helped fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation aimed at influencing the U.S. and allied governments.

Greenway said the Biden administration’s efforts to enhance ties with Iran were doomed from the start, and that Tehran’s efforts to kill and intimidate former Trump officials were not simply revenge for Soleimani or the economic punishment it had endured. “It’s way beyond Soleimani now,” he said. “It’s about the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House.”

Concerned by Iran’s growing aggression, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan vowed in January 2022 that the U.S. would "protect and defend its citizens" after Iran purported to impose unspecified “sanctions” on 52 Americans, increased its proxy militias’ attacks on American troops in the Middle East, and threatened to carry out terror operations “inside the United States and elsewhere around the world.”

Yet the fact that Iran had assassination teams in the U.S. going after former officials (as well as Iranian American critics of the regime) was not enough for the Biden administration to walk away from its ongoing negotiations with the Islamic Republic. By continuing to engage in talks, the administration effectively signaled that targeting former Trump security officials was behavior that it was willing to tolerate.