May 28: Iran Could Have Nukes in a Week

IDF strike in Rafah; Tlaib and Singham; Port Biden sinks

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The Big Story

Iran has increased its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to more than 30 times the limit established in the Iran nuclear deal, according to press accounts of a confidential Monday report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Experts assess that the Islamic Republic now possesses enough highly enriched uranium to produce three to four nuclear weapons within a week. 

The IAEA report found that as of May 11, Iran possessed 312.2 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60%, an increase of 45.4 pounds since the agency’s previous report in February. Uranium enriched at 60% purity can quickly be converted to weapons-grade purity levels of 90%. While Tehran’s nuclear breakout time was already effectively at zero—meaning that it could produce a functional weapon within days if it chose to do so—the figures reported by the IAEA suggest that Iran could quickly develop a larger nuclear arsenal than previously thought possible. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit nuclear watchdog, writes on X that Iran can now produce enough weapons-grade uranium for eight nukes within one month, 10 within two months, 12 within three months, and 13 within four months. Once the weapons are ready, it will take Iran only about a year to mount them on ballistic missiles capable of striking inside Israel, according to Patrick Clawson of The Washington Institute, quoted in Iran International. 

Also on Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Britain and France, alarmed by Tehran’s nuclear progress, want to formally censure Iran at an upcoming meeting of the IAEA’s member-state board in early June. But “diplomats involved in discussions” claim that the Biden administration is lobbying against this effort behind the scenes. According to the WSJ: 

The U.S. is arguing against an effort by Britain and France to censure Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s member-state board in early June, the diplomats said. The U.S. has pressed a number of other countries to abstain in a censure vote, saying that is what Washington will do, they said.

U.S. officials deny lobbying against a resolution. 

The report went on to note that the Europeans fear “that failure to take action would undermine the authority of the IAEA” and “are frustrated over what they see as U.S. efforts to undermine their approach.”

But why is the Biden administration, which only a few weeks ago promised that it would never allow Iran to get nukes, undermining European efforts to censure the Iranians for their noncompliance? U.S. officials quoted in the WSJ offered several seemingly contradictory excuses: that Iran might become more “volatile” as it moves toward new presidential elections; that a formal rebuke would be ineffective, given China and Russia’s ability to veto U.N. Security Council measures; that a censure vote could actually provoke the Iranians into further noncompliance; and that U.S. intelligence judges that the Iranians have no intention of producing a nuclear weapon anyway, so why bother? European officials, meanwhile, speculated that the White House wanted to wait until after the November elections to request that the IAEA begin compiling a “comprehensive report” on Iran’s nuclear violations, which could in turn “build the case for a snapback of international sanctions”—an option that expires in October 2025. 

Taken on their own terms, these arguments don’t make any sense. Why delay asking the IAEA to begin compiling its report until November, when the report is supposed to be a preliminary first step toward building a case for sanctions that will be impossible to impose after next October? And how is that case for sanctions supposed to work anyway if, as U.S. officials say now, China and Russia will veto any anti-Iran measures?

This apparent incoherence is a clue that what we are looking at is Obama-Biden “strategic messaging.” The administration’s policy for the Middle East—“regional integration” under joint U.S.-Iranian management—is set and will not be altered no matter what Iran does. But the White House does not want to admit its policy publicly, for the very rational reason that it does not want to be seen as allying with an anti-American terror state thumbing its nose at the UN’s nuclear weapons watchdog. So it instead invents an endless array of excuses and rationalizations for why the United States should look the other way in response to this or that specific Iranian provocation. Hey, we’d love to crack down on the Iranians—just not now, with a war on and an election coming up. Think of how an IAEA report would play in Dearborn! 

In other words, the entire purpose of the administration’s messaging is to justify a pro-Iranian policy that it can neither admit to nor defend. It would be funny, if the predictable result wasn’t an Islamic Republic with nukes.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Natan Sharansky on the Columbia antisemitism letter

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The Rest

→Israel is again under fire from the “international community” (read: Europe, the White House, The New York Times) following a targeted airstrike in Rafah on Sunday that killed two senior Hamas commanders. Following the pattern established since Oct. 7, the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health rushed in the immediate aftermath of the strike to claim that 45 civilians had been killed in an IDF bombardment on a designated “safe zone.” This claim was amplified by the international media and the White House, which issued a statement Monday condemning the “heartbreaking” loss of life. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even felt compelled to apologize Monday for what he called a “tragic mistake.”

Also following the post-10/7 pattern, the initial atrocity story fell apart in about 24 hours. An IDF investigation released Tuesday found that the strikes, which were conducted with “the smallest munitions our jets can use,” had not targeted the safe zone but a nearby structure in which Hamas leaders were meeting. A secondary explosion, possibly from a Hamas ammunitions cache, ignited a fire that then spread to the civilian encampment. Audio of an intercepted conversation between two Gazans, released by the IDF, seemed to confirm as much: 

In another video of the aftermath of the strike, shared on the Abu Ali Express Telegram channel, a man explains in Arabic that the Israelis hit a Hamas Jeep “filled with ammo and weapons.” The IDF has promised that a complete investigation will follow Tuesday’s preliminary report.

→One of the most vocal critics of this latest IDF “massacre” was Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who said on X, “This was intentional. You don’t accidentally kill massive amounts of children and their families over and over again and get to say, ‘It was a mistake.’” Tlaib was fresh off a Saturday speaking appearance at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, where her fellow speakers included an active member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Wissam Rafidi, and the widow of a PFLP terrorist who died in Israeli prison earlier this year. The conference’s steering committee featured the major groups in the Shut It Down for Palestine (SID4P) movement, including The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, Al-Awda, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and the National Students for Justice in Palestine. As we reported in our May 15 Big Story, the SID4P movement is heavily financed by Neville Roy Singham, the Shanghai-based Maoist tech executive with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s international propaganda apparatus. The People’s Forum and ANSWER, in particular, are fronts for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist-Leninist group that appears to run almost exclusively on Singham’s funding. Video of the conference was broadcast on BreakThrough News, the Singham network’s media arm, which employs several PSL functionaries as well as the Assadist journalist Rania Khalek. 

→News of the fake massacre also prompted a call for “escalation” that appears to have originated with Writers Against the War on Gaza, another group on the People’s Conference for Palestine steering committee, and was reposted throughout radical networks on Monday:

→An Egyptian soldier was killed in an exchange of fire with IDF troops near the Rafah border crossing on Monday. A report in Ynet, citing Israeli military sources, claimed that the clash started when the Egyptians opened fire on the Israelis, although Egyptian state media reported late Monday that the incident had been triggered by an exchange of gunfire between the IDF and Palestinian forces, leading to “shooting in several directions.” Lebanese media reported Tuesday that a second Egyptian soldier had died from his wounds, but Egyptian media denied this report.

→The U.S. humanitarian pier in Gaza was rendered “temporarily inoperable” after several pieces broke loose during rough weather conditions over the weekend, only days after three U.S. servicemen on the pier were injured in a forklift accident. U.S. officials said Tuesday they would need “well over a week” to repair the damage, according to The Times of Israel. On X, shipping analyst Sal Mercogliano notes that sea conditions in the eastern Mediterranean regularly exceed the capacity of a Logistics Over the Shore (JLOTS) structure, the technical term for the style of temporary pier constructed in Gaza, meaning that even if “Port Biden” is fixed, it will simply break again the next time there is rough weather. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for something.

→The Fall of the White Male Ally, a Cautionary Tale: Over the holiday weekend, David Austin Walsh, “historian” of the far-right and long-lost extra from the Robert Redford version of The Great Gatsby, took to X to vent his frustration that he couldn’t find a tenure-track job teaching African American history, despite his “numerous peer-reviewed articles” and essays in The New York Times. Why not? Well, the poor man couldn’t help but suspect that it was in part because he looks like this: 

After being “called in” by several of his tenured peers of color, however, Walsh issued a groveling apology for what he called his “breech [sic] of solidarity.” In that apology, Walsh fingered the real culprits for why he can’t land a plum humanities gig: “austerity,” “corporatization,” the “RW assault on higher education,” and the “brutal suppression of the campus protests over the last month.”  

We want to feel bad for the guy, but we’re not quite sure what he’s complaining about. He is, after all, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, which sounds pretty prestigious. And what, pray tell, are his contributions to the field of antisemitism research? Feast your eyes:

BigMeanInternet, by the way, is the X handle of writer Malcolm Harris, and his point was that a swastika on a synagogue now signifies a “condemnation of genocide,” due to Israel. Harris is a signatory of the Writers Against the War on Gaza open letter published in October 2023.

→But Dr. Walsh is not merely an expert on antisemitism; he’s also a penetrating observer of U.S. politics. For instance, last Tuesday he published an essay in The New York Times about a video that Donald Trump posted to Truth Social, which featured a newspaper headline promising the “creation of a unified Reich.” The video, Walsh wrote, was a “suggestion that our country is on the glide path toward Nazi Germany in a second Trump term” and a warning that “a generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain [sic].” Indeed, within days of Walsh’s essay appearing, a crack team of investigative reporters at CNN was able to identify the Nazi behind the video. Behold, the face of American white supremacy:

That’s Enes Simsek, a 30-year-old freelance graphic designer from Turkey, who lifted the “unified Reich” text from the Wikipedia article on World War I for inclusion in a newsreel video template. Reached by telephone, Simsek told CNN that he doesn’t follow politics but thanked Trump for choosing his template. He added, “I want to come to America.”

→Quote of the Day: 

The inability of nonprofits to properly manage services results in European taxes for third-world state capacity. Residents don’t know what the problem is: they don’t know that their taxes go to “violence interrupters” who are convicted felons; they don’t know affordable housing nonprofits use taxpayer money to lobby against affordable housing; and they don’t know money is being misallocated due to insuf­ficient oversight of nonprofits.

All they know is they pay high taxes for no reason. And so they leave.

That’s from an essay by Jonathan Ireland in the new issue of American Affairs, on how the nonprofit industrial complex is destroying American cities. 

Read it here. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

We Got Lost in Gaza, by Maya Arad

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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 500

A letter from 500 Jews at Columbia University may be a landmark in the struggle to escape a stifling regime of doublethink and ensure the American Jewish future through proud and open dissent

by Natan Sharansky

In the furor over America’s campuses, it was easy to miss the letter that 500 of Columbia University’s Jews penned and signed to present their position in their own voice. Yet it was this letter, quietly distributed and far less aggressive than some of the other events that overshadowed it, that may prove to be the turning point in the struggle for American Jewry’s future. This is why.

Twenty years ago, just after the second intifada, I went on a tour of American and Canadian campuses. Shaken by what I saw and heard, I told (then) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the major battle for the future of American Jewry will be fought on campuses. So disturbed was I by this visit, that I titled the article I wrote about it in the Hebrew press “a journey into occupied territory.”

The “occupiers” in my metaphor were the centers for Middle East studies that had sprouted like mushrooms in American universities to spread anti-Zionist propaganda. Their influence was palpable, not only in events they organized, but also in their effect on the Jewish students I met. While many expressed deep solidarity with Israel and support for its struggle against terror, a few young men and women told me that for them, as liberal Jews, it would be better if Israel didn’t exist. “Then,” they told me, “I won’t be perceived as responsible for such awful crimes.”

Such statements, which foreshadowed attempts by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace to dissociate themselves from Israel, didn’t concern me as much as yet another, and far more alarming, set of statements. People who wish to fully sever their association with Israel neither reflect nor sway the sentiments and opinions of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. No, the statements that concerned me and led me to speak of occupation and battlefields were the many variations I heard on one young woman’s quietly spoken and regretful admission that she would very much like to speak against divestment and other anti-Israel measures, but she couldn’t. Her professors won’t like it, she told me. It would harm her future career.

Dear Lord, I thought, when I first heard these words. We are not in the Moscow of my youth, where one’s career depended on pretending to buy the Soviet credo hook, line and sinker! Yet the more students I met, the more I heard of similar, stifling concerns. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I knew very well how catching and pervasive self-censorship can become. No one will need to “occupy” the campuses physically if the Jewish students will carry out their own occupation themselves by growing too afraid to speak their own truths.

Totalitarian societies survive by relying on a core of true believers to frighten even those who don’t buy the ideological party line into becoming “doublethinkers”—people who adhere to the party line in public regardless of their private thoughts—rather than outright dissidents. In the normal course of events, the percentage of doublethinkers is always on the rise, as more and more people grow disillusioned with the false promises of the regime yet continue to pledge allegiance to it out of fear instead of faith. The regime controls them not through their own convictions but through the power its institutions hold over their lives, livelihoods, and safety. In other words, it controls them by frightening them into censoring themselves on the regime’s behalf.

Of course America is a free country and not a totalitarian regime. However, it was impossible to miss the resemblance between the culture I encountered in the American academy 20 years ago and the Soviet worldview of my youth. Like the Communist party (following Marx), more and more people started dividing the world into oppressors (read: always bad, always in the wrong) and oppressed (read: always in the right), and claiming that whoever belonged to the first camp wasn’t worthy of the same rights, freedoms, and protections as the latter. Since Israel and successful “white” Jews elsewhere were a priori classified as oppressors, hating and indeed abusing them became less and less taboo.

In the past 20 years, the ideologues of this new antisemitism continued to pour their fervor into demonizing Israel, and to use every tool at their disposal to press the majority of American Jews who don’t believe their lies into becoming doublethinkers. They made it more and more difficult to get a public position in a student body for students who supported Israel or even visited it on a Birthright trip. They gaslighted Jewish students who spoke about their personal experiences of antisemitism by telling them that what they experienced was really “only” and “legitimate” anti-Zionism, putting them on the defensive for their so called “alarmism” and “rejection of legitimate criticism.” More and more Jewish students found that standing up for their beliefs marked them for discrimination and harassment. Jewish students found themselves unwilling doublethinkers in the very places that are supposed to be the bedrock and bastion of free society.

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After Oct. 7, the campaign to vilify Israel and scare its potential supporters on campuses has exploded into the open. Explicit antisemitism became legitimate and accepted on many American campuses, as so-called “anti-Zionism” revealed itself to be a flimsy cover for unadorned antisemitism. At Drexel University, “anti-Zionist” protesters demanded that the university sever its association with Hillel and Chabad, eliminating Jewish life on campus. At the University of Toronto and other campuses, protesters proudly recite classic antisemitic canards about Jewish control of the banks and the press while calling for genocide and praising Hitler. At UCLA, the university administration reached an agreement with protesters allowing them to bar students with the “wrong” opinions—i.e., Jews—from campus. At Columbia, a leader of the student protests expressed his personal desire to kill Jews.

None of these are isolated incidents; they are in fact true expressions of what “anti-Zionism” means to its proponents, namely, to drive Jewish students and professors off campus or at the very least to force them to live in disguise. Jews are now routinely warned not to speak Hebrew or wear a kippa on campuses for their own protection, while their would-be harassers are lauded as heroes and are at best given slaps on the wrist which are revoked weeks or days later, when presumably fewer people are watching (imagine the outrage if female students were warned not to dress immodestly on campus for their own protection, while their would-be harassers were lauded as heroes!). A flat denial of Israel’s right to exist became an axiom that goes without saying. Surrounded by classmates and professors who celebrate the worst violations of human rights in recent history—Hamas’ horrific massacre on Oct. 7—as a legitimate step toward liberation, the Jewish students are left to fend for themselves, abandoned by the progressive allies that Jewish institutions and individuals supported unquestioningly in their own hours of need.

The occupation of the campuses, which 20 years ago was but a metaphor, has become a real movement with funding, leadership, and physical presence. Young Jews no longer face ostensible threats against their professional futures; they face daily threats against their physical safety and the core of their identities as Jews and as human beings.

It was into this foul atmosphere that Columbia’s Jewish students wrote their letter. Five hundred of Columbia’s Jewish students declared that they won’t be cowed by the haters, that they reject the attacks against their Jewish identity, and that Zionism is a part of Jewish identity. They called out their haters for the antisemites they are, and the administration of the university for downplaying and mishandling the attacks that target Jews. They flatly rejected attempts to victim-blame the Jews for the hatred that targets them. Most remarkably, they all signed the letter with their full names, proudly and openly, shedding the self-censorship and silence of the doublethinker for the proud stance of the dissident. In the days since then, more and more Jews added their names to this list.

When I was a dissident in the USSR, my friends and I knew well that a revolution can only start when a critical mass of doublethinkers stops being afraid and crosses the line into open dissent. Only when the masses lose their fear and drop the mask of pretense, can they lead their society into a different future. It was true in the USSR, and it is true today: The ideological regime of antisemitism that has entrenched itself in America’s universities for decades will only collapse when enough Jews stop being afraid. It will only collapse if they stop unwillingly aiding it by hiding and self-censoring, and instead speak their truths openly and loudly.

When we were fighting the USSR from within, we estimated that once approximately a fifth of the population will transform from doublethinkers into dissidents, the authorities will no longer be able to contain the spread of free thought. Heartwarmingly, more than a fifth of the Jews of Columbia University have already signed the letter that marks them as dissidents to the reigning ideological regime. I hope that our estimations decades ago about the tipping point from oppression to revolution will prove right in the case of this revolution as well.

The next year will likely be as tough for Jews on campus as this one. Of course, in democratic America there are many tools that can be used to fight antisemitism: going to court, encouraging hearings in Congress, using the press to unmask the dangerous actors who finance the new antisemitic waves, and so forth. But in order to defend your rights, you have to first define and claim them. Until America’s Jewish students publicly claim their right to their Jewish and Zionist identity, they will continue to fight at a disadvantage.

However, if the Jewish students of Cornell, Stanford, Harvard, and the other campuses will join Columbia’s Jews in their public statement, they stand a chance to do more than stand up for their own truths—they stand a real chance to revolutionize the campuses, defeat the antisemitic forces that have occupied them, and win the battle for American Jewry’s future.

Dear Jewish students of America, today, you are on the front line. The future of American Jewry, and maybe even America itself, is in your hands. Be brave.