Sep. 9, 2024: Iran Defies Western 'Red Line,' Ships Missiles to Russia

ISIS sympathizer arrested for Chabad terror plot; The Iraq-Iran money laundering network; Dick Cheney, failed generals endorse Harris

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The Big Story

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Iran had delivered “a couple of hundred” short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, citing conversations with U.S. and European officials. The exact number and make of the missiles was not disclosed in the report, but back in February, Reuters reported, citing unnamed Iranian sources, that Iran had already delivered about 400 surface-to-surface ballistic missiles to Russia. American and European officials at the time denied those reports but threatened to impose coordinated sanctions through the G-7 if the missile delivery went through.

Iran has denied reports of the missile deliveries; Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, said Monday that “Iran is our important partner, we are developing our trade and economic relations, we are developing our cooperation and dialogue in all possible areas, including the most sensitive ones,” according to an unsourced report in Ynet News. If true, the missile transfer represents the latest step in Moscow’s deepening military cooperation with Tehran. As we have previously reported at The Scroll, Iran has provided Russia with munitions, artillery shells, attack drones, and troops—recruited from Syria by Hezbollah—for the Russian war in Ukraine. In exchange, Russia has agreed to sell Iran fighter jets, attack helicopters, and training aircraft, though it is not clear from media reports whether these have been delivered. 

According to the Friday report in the Journal, European officials say they will now move forward with sanctions crafted in partnership with the United States over the summer, including barring Iran Air from flying to European airports, and targeting Iranian businesses and individuals involved in the missile transfers. The report notes, however, that:

while EU officials had said earlier this year that Iranian missile transfers to Russia would be a red line that could see them directly wind back some of the sanctions relief Tehran won in the 2015 nuclear deal, they have been more tentative in recent weeks. One senior European diplomat said last week that beyond the airline sector, other economic or banking ties with Iran won’t be severed.

Color us shocked. The Journal reported, furthermore, that U.S. officials who had repeatedly warned against the missile transfers said they looked forward to continuing direct talks with Iran, mediated by Oman, in the coming months.

We wouldn’t rule out the White House slapping some targeted sanctions on a handful Iranians in order to ‘fulfill’ Vice President Kamala Harris’ vow to “take whatever action is necessary to defend our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.” But in reality, Iranian revenue is booming from Washington’s deliberate refusal to enforce oil sanctions. The head of Iran’s Customs Administration boasted at the end of July that Iran had exported $15.7 billion worth of oil between late March and late July. Iran’s oil output has topped 3.2 million barrels per day in 2024, the highest level since then President Donald Trump imposed sanctions in 2018, according to data from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cited in an August report from Reuters.

On Aug. 29, meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a fresh warning that Iran was continuing to expand its stockpile of weapons-grade uranium and, separately, that Tehran was refusing to comply with an IAEA investigation into the country’s undeclared nuclear materials. Experts now estimate that it would take the Islamic Republic just two months to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for nine nuclear weapons. Yet The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States and its European allies are not planning to recommend disciplinary steps, such as a fresh IAEA censure or a full investigation into Iranian noncompliance, due to the recent election of a new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, with whom IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said he hopes to establish a “fluid, constructive dialogue.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: Netflix rom-com Between the Temples, argues Tablet’s Marco Roth, accidentally stumbles its way into the Zionist unconscious of progressive American Jewry

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The Rest

→A Pakistani ISIS sympathizer was arrested in Canada last week for plotting a mass shooting at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn on the anniversary of Oct. 7. According to a Friday press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a Pakistani citizen residing in Canada, was arrested after disclosing the plot to undercover law-enforcement officers, telling them that he wished to create a “real offline cell” of ISIS supporters to carry out a “coordinated assault” targeting “Israeli Jewish chabads.” Khan repeatedly asked the undercover officers to obtain assault rifles and other weapons, including “some good [hunting] knives so we can slit their throats,” for himself and a U.S.-based associate, explaining that Oct. 7 and Oct. 11 (Yom Kippur) would be the best days for “targeting the jews.” Khan was arrested Sept. 4 while traveling to the U.S.-Canadian border. 

→Image of the Day:

That’s a visualization of an alleged money-laundering network overseen by Iraqi banker and currency trader Ali Ghulam, which, according to U.S. authorities and a Monday investigation in The Wall Street Journal, saw the transfer of potentially billions of U.S. dollars to Iran via intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates. The network, according to the report, exploited a loophole established after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that allows Iraqi banks to bypass the SWIFT international wire transfer system—which requires banks to disclose the final recipient of transfers—in favor of a system in which the Central Bank of Iraq trades dinars for dollars on behalf of its clients directly with the New York Federal Reserve, and in which no such disclosures are required. 

According to the Journal, Iraq’s predominantly Shiite militias, which are close to Iran, began taking over the Iraqi banking sector to exploit this system; Ghulam, a former member of the Shiite Mahdi Army, who sources claim remains close to “Iran and Iran-backed militias,” was a beneficiary. An audit by K2 Integrity, a financial crimes advisory firm, found that in the course of six months, a single Iraqi company had used this system to launder $243 million through one of Ghulam’s banks. Another source told the paper that Ghulam had sent Iran $1 billion in 2021 alone. The U.S. Treasury and the New York Fed blocked Ghulam’s banks from receiving dollar transfers in 2022 and have since blocked at least 13 other Iraqi banks from conducting dollar transactions over their suspected ties to Iran. 

Read more here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sanctions-14-iraqi-banks-in-crackdown-on-iran-dollar-trade-33ef9f35?mod=article_inline 

→Hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman announced in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that he has resigned from the Brown University Board of Trustees over the university’s upcoming vote on divestment from Israel. The university agreed to the vote back in May, under pressure from student protesters, and it is scheduled for next month. Edelman writes:

I don’t wish to imply that any real principles informed Brown’s decision to hold a divestment vote: It was made not based on facts or values but based on weakness toward student activists. The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.

We don’t know why Edelman decided to resign now, rather than in May, but the university held a meeting with the Brown Divest Coalition last week. Judging from the following excerpt posted by @thestustustudio on X, we wouldn’t blame Edelman if that was the final straw:

If you’re the masochistic sort (we all have our vices), you can watch the entire presentation here.

→Are you a Michigan voter who is interested in “Jewish Studies”? If so, Michigan Rep. and Democratic Senate Candidate Elissa Slotkin doesn’t want you to see her Facebook ads. The Washington Free Beacon reports, citing data from Facebook’s ad library, that Slotkin instructed Facebook not to show at least 12 of her campaign’s ads to users interested in “Jewish Studies.” She did, however, instruct Facebook to show 12 ads—it is unclear if they were the same ads—to users interested in “Islamic studies,” “Middle Eastern studies,” and “Al Jazeera,” and she targeted an additional three ads at users interested in the “State of Palestine” and the “Gaza Strip.”

Slotkin called for a cease-fire in February, and in April, she waited four days to denounce the “hateful language” at an April 5 Quds Day rally in Dearborn, Michigan, where demonstrators chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said last week that “I think those folks speaking out loudly in Michigan are speaking out for all the right reasons.” 

Read it here: https://freebeacon.com/elections/michigans-elissa-slotkin-under-pressure-from-anti-israel-activists-shields-facebook-ads-from-voters-with-jewish-interests/ 

→A group of retired three- and four-star generals calling themselves the “National Security Leaders for America” endorsed Kamala Harris via a letter on Monday, writing that she is the “best—and only—candidate” fit to “serve as our commander-in-chief” and blaming the Trump administration for the problems with Biden’s 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. The letter, which follows former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris over the weekend, was timed to coincide with the release of a damning three-year investigation into the withdrawal by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That report, according to The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, found that the United States left at least $57.6 million in cash, reams of classified information that allowed the Taliban to hunt down Afghan allies of the United States, and at least $7 billion worth of military hardware in Afghanistan. On the subject of the generals, we’ll leave you with this observation from X user @FischerKing:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Talking Torah, by Abigail Pogrebin and Dov Linzer

What two people from different backgrounds discovered about each other—and themselves—by studying the weekly parsha together

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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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Between the Temples

A romantic comedy stumbles its way into the Zionist unconscious of American Jewry

by Marco Roth

A screwball vehicle for a talented ensemble cast, Between the Temples is headlined by the always delightful screen presence of Carol Kane. Just listening to the way she delivers simple lines like "I'll be right downstairs" is worth the ticket or a Netflix subscription. In a cinema defined by endless remakes, sequels, franchises, and AI-generated slop, director Nathan Silver at least shows good taste in his influences by transposing the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude, about an age-inappropriate romance between a 19-year-old man and a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, to a present-day upstate New York congregation of American Jews. The most daring thing about the film, however, is its Hebrew-language "vintage" rock soundtrack featuring Israeli indie musicians from the 1960s and 1970s. Their songs appear at crucial moments to give voice to the internal emotional life of Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), the local synagogue's cantor, who has lost both the desire and ability to sing following the off-screen death of his wife, an erotic novelist. Quite by accident, the music sharpens the film's portrayals of the cultural contradictions of 21st-century American Judaism, ultimately exploding them.

"Cantor Ben," as he's called in the infantile, permanent summer camp idiom of contemporary progressive institutions, is in his early 40s, and has moved back in with his two lesbian moms: the forever meddlesome Judith, a Filipina convert (the dagger-eyed Dolly de Leon), and his birth mother, Meira (Caroline Aaron), whose Alex Katz-esque portraits of young Ben adorn the walls; Dad has been written entirely out of the picture. As male authority figures go, there's Rabbi Bruce (a typically on point Robert Smigel), who appears interested mainly in fundraising and golf, and keeps Ben on at the synagogue at the cost of his remaining self-respect, making him caddy on golf excursions and retrieving missed putts in his office, where he works on his short game by aiming golf balls at a shofar.

Into this atmosphere of total emotional and spiritual stasis, conveyed by the asphyxiating, anxiety-provoking close-ups, dizzying handheld swoops, and quirky angles of former Safdie brothers cinematographer Sean Price Williams, comes Ben's former middle school music teacher, “Ms. O’Connor,” from the era before everyone was on a first name basis. Ben eventually learns to think of her as Carla, daughter of Jewish socialists, who wants the bat mitzvah she never got in the 1960s. The rest is pure mumble-core rom-com, carried by the actors, including excellent cameos from Madeline Weinstein as the rabbi's daughter, tasked with playing a character who is supposed to be a bad actress; Matthew Shear as Carla's insufferable psychoanalyst son "Nat"; and Jason Grisell as a Catholic priest Ben turns to for spiritual guidance. For the rest, we are essentially watching Kane and Schwartzman conduct each other through improv workshop exercises: breathing, articulation, gesture, with the question of when the cantor will find his song adding to the suspense.

Silver keeps the film deliberately light on exposition: Ben reveals the manner of his wife's death over dinner with Carla at a local diner, about half an hour into the movie, between bites of his first ever cheeseburger. We never learn why he wanted to become a cantor, what the attraction of faith was for him, what he likes about Torah, or the Hebrew language, what kind of music he liked to perform, or why he has remained stubbornly walled up inside his grief. The opening scene plays a joke on the audience's desire to know more, presenting us with a plastic surgeon when we're expecting a psychoanalyst, thereby announcing that we are watching a play of surfaces.

This style of muted emotive minimalism trains an audience to look at these large negative spaces the film creates and formulate questions around them. The hollowed-out feeling around much religious observance, particularly mainstream, suburban American Jewish observance, is by now a cultural commonplace. Cinematically, the Coen brothers got there in 2009 with A Serious Man, which used the 1960s to talk about the spiritual state of American Jews in 2009. Israel, whether as an idea or an existing state of Jewish people, plays no role in the minds of the characters of Between The Temples, the word "Yisrael" itself is never uttered, not even in the prayers the film depicts. If, as in so many American congregations, an Israeli flag flies somewhere at Rabbi Bruce's Temple Sinai, we never see it.

This erasure of Israel has nothing to do with the anti-Zionist reaction after Oct. 7—the film was conceived, shot, and most likely edited and wrapped well before then. But it has everything to do with the preexisting conditions that led to the post-Oct. 7 schism within American Jewry. The Jews of Between the Temples are typical Americans who could just as easily live without both Judaism and Zionism, as long as whatever they do choose doesn't make them look bad in front of the goyim. They could be Presbyterians. What they want from their religious life is a vague promise of meaning within a greater fear of existential meaninglessness, or, failing that just a sense of structure: "Rules are very important to Judith," Ben's biological mother reminds him. The temple is a greater surrogate family, both a haven in a heartless world and, according to the scripts of American adolescence, something you have to outgrow and move on from, especially if you are trying to fill a spiritual and emotional void in your own life.

So what happens when this crew of talented filmmakers need to signal that inside their stunted man-child character is a wild and yearning Jewish heart, beating furiously? They do so with Hebrew prog rock written and performed by actual human beings from the land of Israel—like Shlomo Gronich and Matti Caspi—who sing not in the awkward, embarrassed strangled idioms of modern American-accented Ashkenaz "prayer," but in full-throated modern Hebrew. Whether or not we want to be thinking about Zionism, or of ourselves as Zionists, it appears like a song stuck in our heads.

The simple truth is that the very existence of this music and its lyrics results from a project that most progressive American Jews are rapidly disassociating themselves from. In that context, it matters less that Gronich and Caspi were part of an autonomous, anti-establishment Israeli indie rock moment than that Silver and his team managed to smuggle Israeli content of any kind without apology into a diasporic, American Jewish rom-com made in 2024. The music is used to express everything that currently has no outlet in the feel-good discursive matrix of progressive Judaism; deep sorrow; longing for the lost and unattainable beloved; joy, and, most importantly, as rock ’n’ roll can do in all its forms, the desire for personal and collective freedom.