What Happened Today: August 11, 2023
Iran to swap prisoners for cash; Hunter Biden investigation widens; Elon v. Zuck set for Italy
The Big Story
Terms of a tentative agreement for Iran to receive between $6 and $7 billion in funds—which were previously frozen by sanctions—in exchange for releasing five Iranian American prisoners have been outlined by officials from both nations. The deal stipulates that the detainees will be placed in a hotel on house arrest until Iran’s billions in oil revenue frozen by sanctions in a South Korea bank are successfully transferred to another account in Qatar, initiating the detainees’ release. The impounded assets had become a point of recent contention, with Tehran seizing a South Korean oil tanker amid threats of more retaliation if they did not get their money. “Definitely Iran will not remain silent, and we have many options that could harm the Koreans, and we will certainly use them,” Iranian parliament member Fada Hossein Maleki said at the time.
“My belief is that this is the beginning of the end of their nightmare,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said of the five prisoners, two of whom have not yet been identified. The three others, Siamak Namazi, Emad Sharghi and Morad Tahbaz, had each been sentenced to 10 years in prison for unsubstantiated allegations of spying.
Iran has vastly expanded its nuclear program in recent years and has continued to fund terrorist groups like Hezbollah across the Middle East while providing assistance to Russia in its war against Ukraine. Supporters of the new deal say that it could both curb Iran’s nuclear program and calm tensions in the waters of the Persian Gulf. But critics of the negotiations with Iran, which will empower the main regional rival of the United States’ primary allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia, say the release of roughly $1.5 billion in assets per hostage sends the message that there is a reward for imprisoning Americans.
In The Back Pages: The Silence of the Lambs
The Rest
→ Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss has been granted special counsel status by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday, which will give him permission to broaden his ongoing prosecution of Hunter Biden beyond Delaware and into any district he deems necessary. The escalation of the federal investigation of the president’s son comes the same day that Weiss wrote in a court brief that a tentative plea deal with Biden’s lawyers had fallen through. While Weiss seems prepared to increase the pressure on Biden, as he told the Delaware judge he needed to dismiss the charges against Biden there so he could pursue new charges in other places where Biden previously lived, Biden’s attorneys said they anticipated their client would end the case before it moved to trial. “We are confident when all of these maneuverings are at an end, my client will have resolution and will be moving on with his life successfully,” said Chris Clark, one of Biden’s attorneys.
→ Former president Donald Trump could stand trial and receive either an innocent or guilty verdict before the GOP primaries begin in earnest, as Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to speed up the case against Trump for his involvement in trying to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in January 2020. Looking for a Jan. 2, 2024, trial date in a filing on Thursday, Smith’s office told U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya that the trial shouldn’t take any longer than four to six weeks, which would mean a verdict could be determined well before the Michigan and South Carolina GOP primaries.
→ A $6 billion settlement Purdue Pharma had inked to clear its Sackler family owners of future liabilities over various opioid lawsuits has been blocked by the Supreme Court as the justices agreed to hear U.S. attorneys argue that the settlement shouldn’t prevent future parties from seeking damages. The decision will immediately freeze billions of dollars pledged by companies across the pharma industry to tackle the opioid crisis they largely created, and it will leave the door open to potentially larger sums being paid by not only Purdue but other operators, like distributors and pharmacies that sold opioids. The Sacklers will now return to the hot seat and face the possibility of losing the billions in compensation they’d received from Purdue over the years as the court debates whether they should be protected as third-party members under the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court where the Purdue settlement was reached.
→ One of the last surviving witnesses in the unsolved murder of Tupac Shakur was detained with his wife in July, according to police lapel videos obtained Thursday by The Associated Press. A warrant for the arrest sought Duane “Keefe D” Davis, now 60, who was the uncle of a suspect in the murder and a known adversary of Tupac.
Facing life in prison on drug charges, Davis had brokered a deal with federal authorities in 2010, according to his 2019 tell-all memoir, Compton Street Legend.
It was the first time he discussed his role in the killing with police, he wrote. Davis had been inside the white Cadillac from which shooters opened fired on a BMW in which Tupac and Death Row Records founder Suge Knight were waiting at a red light on the Las Vegas Strip.
Tupac died later that week from his gunshot wounds, and investigators never pressed charges against Davis or the other men in the car, including Davis’ nephew.
“Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police detective, alleged [in 2019] to CBS News Los Angeles that Shakur’s murder had already been solved after Davis confessed to his involvement in the killing,” The Associated Press noted.
→ Quote of the Day:
Everything done will pay respect to the past and present of Italy.
That’s Elon Musk announcing he will in fact fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight somewhere in Italy with the blessing of the country’s minister of culture. The event came about after the two exchanged barbs on their respective social media platforms earlier this summer. Betting books are divided over who’s the favorite. “Zuckerberg is 12 years younger and has taken part in an intensive challenge in which he ran a mile, completed 100 pull-ups, 200 press-ups and 300 squats, before running a further mile, all while wearing a 9kg weighted vest,” DraftKings’ Director of Operations Johnny Avello wrote in a statement. Meanwhile, Bovada has Zuckerberg as a +110 underdog. “We’d likely tip the scales to Musk,” a Bovada spokesperson told Insider. “Zuck might outlast him and has height on his side, but with reach and previous training on his side, we like Musk as the -150 favorite.”
→ Las Vegas will be the site this weekend for warfare between a cadre of hackers and some of the world’s largest and most powerful AI systems, as tech companies and even the White House want to see what types of flaws can be found in the tech architecture vital to a growing number of critical sectors. Google, Meta, and OpenAI worked with Biden administration officials to stage the event at an annual hackers conference to suss out national security risks before they’re found and exploited by potential state enemies. It wouldn’t be the first time government agencies have tapped the hacker community to shore up their systems. At a hacker challenge last year, one cyber sleuth uncovered a critical flaw in the army’s electrical microgrid by forcing false weather data into its system.
→ The U.K. air-taxi start-up Vertical Aerospace will ground its fleet of high-flying vehicles after a five-person craft crashed this week during a test flight. One industry analyst noted that the crash scene photos “depicted the vehicle as having incurred significant damage,” a discouraging turn of events for the company, which needed to pass the test to show regulators it could still maneuver the taxi during a staged motor failure event. The setback will likely delay the anticipated 2026 commercial debut of the closely watched air taxi.
→ Kristin Harila, the 37-year-old Norwegian climber who’d become the fastest person ever to summit all 14 of the world’s largest mountains (26,000 feet or higher) in July, is accused of failing to aid a fallen sherpa during a risky ascent, who later died. After drone footage appeared to show her moving past the immobile sherpa without helping him, Harila responded to critics in an Instagram post on Thursday. Harila says her cameraman stayed back to organize the other climbers as they tried to aid the man, who Harila says was “not properly equipped for the climb,” as he lacked both gloves and a down suit. Harila’s own sherpa, Tenjen, told reporters this week that sherpas, many of whom emigrate to the area for the jobs, need more support from the government for the dangerous work. “It is not possible to just continue climbing mountains as you grow older, so what else is there than to think of migrating abroad. … That can all be stopped if they were given land, houses to live, and other opportunities here.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
How Charlottesville Broke the Peace by Lee Smith
The South already lost the Civil War. Why are Trump’s opponents so interested in restarting it?
Turning a Kibbutz Into a Tourist Attraction by Hillel Kuttler
Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk is a finalist for a United Nations designation that could draw visitors to its historic grounds in northern Israel
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.
The Silence of the Lambs
For American Iran scholars, fighting the right is more important than criticizing the regime—or listening to Iranians
Ladan Zarabadi, a gender studies scholar at UCLA, first began her academic career in the U.S. in 2010, after participating in Iran’s Green Movement protests the year prior. Initially receiving a Ph.D in architecture, she proceeded to transition into women’s sudies with a focus on Iranian feminist movements. Her experiences in her new academic environment, however, took her by surprise. She struggled to recognize the Iran she had lived in with the Iran that was portrayed by her peers.
“I was shocked. Why is there such a gap? What’s happening here?” she says.
Zarabadi is an unabashed critic of the Iranian regime and its human rights abuses—an attitude well within the mainstream of the Iranian diaspora. But on her affluent, Southern California campus, she felt that her critical stance toward the Iranian government placed her on the margins. Zarabadi found that her colleagues in U.S. academia were less interested in seeing Iran through the eyes of Iranians and more prone to positioning themselves in a dichotomous ideological battle between American progressives and conservatives—one in which excessive criticism of the regime in Tehran can be perceived as “right-wing” and even “imperialist.”
“It is not just about interpreting reality, it’s about interpreting reality in a certain way to fulfill a specific ideology or a specific discourse,” she tells me. While Zarabadi found that she was ostensibly welcomed as a woman of color, her colleagues tended to dismiss her actual lived experience and perspectives as an Iranian woman. Instead, she was told to “read the books.”
Over the last decade, progressive opinion on Iran has tended to be defined by a belief in gradualism and the stability of the Iranian regime. Wary of the potentially destructive effects of regime change in Iran, many American progressives have instead put their trust in “moderate” and “reformist” elements of the Iranian government, represented by individuals like former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and former President Hassan Rouhani, to form a bulwark against so-called “hardline” elements of the Iranian state. Central to this reading of Iran have been an acute concern with “militarization” of the U.S.-Iranian rivalry, a tendency to blame U.S. foreign policy for the excesses of the regime, and an aversion to criticism of Iran’s mandatory hijab policy, which American progressives see as Islamophobic—and overly reminiscent of the rhetoric of Republicans like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
The progressive understanding of Iran, however, has increasingly come into tension with the realities on the ground—tension exacerbated by the recent “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which featured Iranians calling for regime overthrow, burning hijabs, attacking “reformists” as part of the same rotten system as the “hardliners,” and chanting “Our enemy is here, they lie to us when they say it’s America.”
According to Zarabadi, these tensions have largely been ignored by Western academics, who have continued to repeat the same convenient narratives or retreated into deafening silence. During the National Women’s Studies Association’s conference in November 2022, which took place at the peak of the anti-regime protests, Zarabadi says, certain Iran scholars at the conference almost exclusively focused their talks on American sanctions while criticizing Iranian diaspora opposition. She took to Twitter and denounced her colleagues for “spreading misinformation,” “manipulating reality,” and putting academic freedom at risk to fulfill dogmas of anti-Americanism and anti-Islamophobia.
Progressive scholarship on Iran has also been significantly influenced by a so-called “humanization narrative,” which seeks to demonstrate how normal life goes on for the average Iranian. The aim, in the eyes of these scholars, is to counteract a “neoconservative agenda” that “demonizes” Iran in order to cultivate support for regime change. Often, however, this requires academics to pull their punches in order to preserve career-building sources within the country. For example, Laudan Nooshin, an ethnomusicologist at City University London, claims to have threatened legal action against the publisher of a book she contributed to, Rough Guide to World Music, after they edited her section to include words that might offend the clerics, which imperiled her access to fieldwork in Iran.
In recent years, some of the most revered activist voices in Iran have taken aim at this Western progressive impulse to “humanize,” on the grounds that it whitewashes the regime’s crimes. Take the sarcastic lyrics of the rapper-activist Toomaj Salehi:
Yes sir! Life is normal, we don’t say otherwise lest we get in trouble.
[…]
For the deeply corrupt regime apologists in the US
Those who compensate for their inferiority by debauchery
There is no Left and Right here, they are all the same
We say we are trapped in a swamp, they say they hope to reform it.
Leading activist Hossein Ronaghi has devoted outsize energy to hounding American scholars and experts in between regular stints as a political prisoner. His frequent complaints have included a dismissal of the Johns Hopkins University’s Rethinking Iran project as “false Islamic Republic propaganda” and accusing Iran experts in the West of misleading the international community by “undermining the severity” of their situation. Most notably, the longtime activist and current prisoner of conscience Bahareh Hedayat sent a letter from Evin prison in December 2022, in which she lampooned progressive intellectuals in the West for their aversion to being critical of Islam and the hijab:
This current [in the West], which occasionally sees itself as anti-imperialist, in a precisely imperialist process, covers its ears when confronted with the voices of a Middle Eastern, Muslim-born woman, and from outside of these conditions accuses us, who are living within these conditions, of Islamophobia; meaning I, as a Middle Eastern woman have no right to cry out against a subservient fate that I’ve been subjected to due to [compulsory] hijab, because according to the ‘progressive’ rules that have been issued by and exported from the intellectual circles of the West, this act of lamenting under the pressure of historical oppression that hijab has enforced upon me signifies fear of Islam, and no one has a right to fear Islam.
While Iranian activists are increasingly disinterested in the perspectives of progressive American academia, the Iranian regime frequently co-opts academic anti-colonial discourse to deflect from international scrutiny. When a Swedish MP demanded answers regarding the regime’s violence against its citizens, Iran’s envoy to Sweden, Ahmad Masoumifar, responded that she needs to familiarize herself with “the unethical implications of orientalist, imperialistic, and chauvinist attitudes”.
According to Saeid Golkar, a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute and associate professor at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, there are rapidly growing secular, pro-American and even in some cases, pro-Israeli, sentiments in Iran, due to a strong desire to oppose the regime’s talking points. He says this tendency does not sit well with many Middle East departments in the United States, as they are dominated by what he calls “leftist liberational studies,” marked by “anti-colonial” perspectives. “They see what is happening and they cannot handle it. Their ideas are very different and they have their own ideological view. That’s why they either ignore it, or they change [the reality],” he says. “There is a sunk cost fallacy, where you invest a lot in a theory and your identity is based on that. If you undermine that, you’re undermining your entire life.”
Perhaps the most infamous case of altering reality occurred in the aftermath of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Quds Force, who was killed in 2020 on the orders of Donald Trump. At the time, many Iranians were either indifferent to or pleased by his death, considering Soleimani to be a butcher and war criminal. But prominent scholars such as Johns Hopkins’ Narges Bajoghli produced chest-thumping, defiant narratives claiming that Soleimani was very popular and that his assassination would cause Iranians to rally around the flag. Pouya Alimagham, an Iran historian at MIT, applauded the heroics of Soleimani for being on the frontlines, “unlike US generals,” and asserted that his “death will only make his legend grow akin to [Che] Guevara’s.” In reality, Soleimani was regularly burned in effigy by protesters over the last year, and Iranian netizens developed a “Qassem check” meme, in which they assessed the credibility of Western Iran experts by checking to see whether they described Soleimani as a national hero at the time of his killing.
Indeed, progressive aversion to staunchly criticizing the Islamic Republic can occasionally reach comical heights. For instance, in a UC Berkeley panel discussion devoted to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in October last year, Sima Shakhsari, a University of Minnesota scholar, avoided talking about the movement almost entirely by throwing out a kitchen sink of leftist talking points on indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, Black Lives Matter, Israeli violence against Palestinians, racist cops, American imperialism, and how the pre-revolutionary bourgeoise in Iran stole from the working class. Finally, she concluded by criticizing the homophobic nature of protest chants against Ayatollah Khamenei, who she claimed has become a “queered enemy.”
“We impose our own context on a discussion about supposedly what’s happening in Iran, but it’s not really about what’s happening in Iran. It’s really about us. Iran just becomes an object. A reference point for us to position ourselves within our own politics, our own cultural wars and our own debates,” said one Iran scholar, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. “There’s a real lack of courage to take a principled position because of the fear of the consequences that it’ll have within the generally left-wing academic world.” The scholar argues that political positioning has taken precedence over Iran expertise, highlighting the appointment of Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, whom he described as having “very modest academic credentials,” to a senior role at Princeton. “If you’re very au fait with the politics, they will look the other way on your lack of knowledge, as far as Iran is concerned,” he said. “It’s very cynical. It’s all about getting jobs and positions and tenure and fellowships. There’s no intellectual substance to it. It’s a game that people are playing, and they want to win the game.”
Maral Karimi, a Canadian Iran scholar, has experienced what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the politics in Middle East academia. Her 2018 book on Iran’s Green Movement protests argued that gradual change is unlikely to lead to democracy in Iran, that the “reformist” wing of the government is not democratic, and that cyclical protests will continue until a genuine democratic alternative arises. Today, Karimi’s conclusions are the consensus in mainstream political discourse on Iran. Yet Karimi says that when her book came out, she was marginalized, frozen out of panels, and ignored by her fellow Iran scholars, due to the uncomfortable political implications of her book. She says that her colleagues accused her of “being brainwashed by U.S. narratives and policies” and called her a “warmonger.” While many have shifted their positions after the recent uprising, Karimi has little sympathy for what she calls “overnighters.”
“There’s something quite oppressive about saying: ‘None of us knew, we all thought that way.’ No, we didn’t all think that way. Many of us stood up and voiced our concerns. Many of us were marginalized. Many of us were silenced by you people,” said Karimi. “Whether it was in the activist arena, or whether it was in academia or in the media, we were sidelined.”
Karimi argues that the gradual change and reform narrative colonized the public space in Western media and academia, leaving little room for dissenting voices who were staunchly critical of both the Islamic Republic and the hegemony of the United States. “A lot of everyday Iranians, not academics, were also against reform. They just weren’t ever heard. They were never given a voice,” she said. “What’s the point of scholarship if I gather a whole bunch of people who think the way I do and we just reiterate each other? What’s the point? What are you afraid of?”
Progressives' hypocrisy is most evident in their appeasement of Iran and bullying of Israel. When reality doesn't match their ideology, reality must be "fixed" via a mix of narrative control, censorship/suppression of alternative viewpoints, and deploying the "fact checkers" to slander their opponents as liars. This is why there is almost no mainstream news coverage of Biden's new Iran "deal" which gifts Iran billions of dollars in return for almost nothing.