An Inconvenient Truth

The assassination on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — Iran’s top nuclear scientist and the father of the still-in-utero Iranian atomic bomb — has sparked debate and indignation about the United States’ Iran policy. According to analysis in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, the assassination of Fakhrizadeh was probably carried out by Israel with approval from the United States and may have been timed to increase friction between the United States and Iran before the Biden presidency begins. The purpose would be to torpedo any warming of relations between Iran and the United States under Biden, who has already announced his intention to reenter the Iran nuclear agreement brokered by Obama and abandoned by Trump.

I’m no fan of Trump, to say the least, and when Biden won the election I breathed a sigh of relief for American democracy and the well-being of Planet Earth. But there is something eerie, even spine-chilling, about the way Iran is reported on in the left-leaning media and conceived of by left-leaning politicians.

For me, as the son of a refugee from Nazi Germany, my main concern with the Iranian regime is its total, unrelenting and enabling involvement over the last 9 years in the Syrian civil war, which has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents and displaced nearly twelve million people, turning them into refugees — half within Syria, half outside of it. Yet the left-leaning media, whom I agree with on many issues, has utterly ignored this crucial bit of context.

When we talk about Syria, we are not just talking casualties of war. According to a 2018 report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 104,000 political prisoners have been executed in cold blood by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In 2017, Amnesty International published a report which stated that between 2011 and 2015 the Syrian government had murdered an estimated 13,000 people, mostly civilians, at the Saydnaya military prison alone (the United States later discovered a crematorium just outside the prison that was used for burning the bodies).

Syria, with Iran’s support, has used chemical weapons to kill hundreds of civilians at a time — and has continued doing so long after Obama set his “red line” in the sand — when he promised “enormous consequences” if Syria continued to use chemical weapons against its own people. A year later, Syria was found to have massacred 1400 people, 426 of them children, in a chemical weapons attack; despite his threat, Obama decided not to attack, instead signing an agreement with Russia to dismantle Syrian chemical weapons capability. Syria, however, continued its use of chemical attacks after the agreement was signed.

The Iranians are not just allied with Syria’s Assad — they are more like his big brother. Destroying the Sunnis in Syria has been part of Iran’s master plan — hatched by General Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated in January — for creating a Shiite arc that stretches from Iran through Lebanon. “Without us, Bashar would not have survived,” claimed Ali Akbar Velayati, the international affairs advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in November 2017.

The extent of Iran’s support for the murderous Assad regime bears Velayati’s statement out. Iran has sent its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as well as regular army ground troops to fight for Assad. It has funded the movement of thousands of Hezbollah troops into Syria from across the border in Lebanon. And it has brought thousands more Shiite fighters, including Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis, into Syria — estimates range from fifteen thousand to many more. Even more importantly, Iran has sent many of its top officers to command troops in Syria. Ten Iranian brigadier generals have died in combat in Syria in the last eight years — a startling measure of the extent to which this genocidal war, in which ninety percent of civilian deaths are estimated to have been committed by pro-Assad forces — is being prosecuted through an Iranian command. And since 2014 — after the Iran deal unfroze the country’s financial assets, Iran has spent billions of dollars funding Syria’s war machine, changing the course of the war.

Yet when the New York Times and the Washington Post report on Iran in the context of Obama’s Iran deal, the murderous actions of the Iranian regime are often not even mentioned in passing. In an opinion piece published in the New York Times on Saturday by Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, she castigates an aggressive Israel for the assassination of Fakhrizadeh but makes no mention of Iran’s role in the Syrian genocide. Nor was there even a throwaway line about the genocide in Ishaan Tharoor’s column on the assassination’s potential complications to Biden’s Iran policy in Monday’s Washington Post.

This blind spot extends beyond right now and beyond the papers. After the targeted killing of Soleimani in January, Stephen Colbert — whose comedy I love — interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders on Iran. For eleven cringeworthy minutes (an eternity in television time), Sanders and Colbert talked about the killing of Soleimani, how it violated diplomatic norms and might drag the United States into a war. Sanders even referenced the evils of the Saudi regime, a U.S. ally, and the murder of the journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, as if Iran wasn’t so bad in comparison. Neither Colbert nor Sanders said a single word about the role of Iran in the worst atrocities of the twenty-first century. I mean, chopping up a journalist in your embassy is always a bad thing, to my mind. But to mention that and leave out half a million dead and twelve million refugees? To fail to acknowledge that Obama’s Iran Deal resulted in crucial financial support for the tottering Assad regime?

I’m not arguing that Biden shouldn’t reenter the Iran deal if it is properly renegotiated to force Iran to abandon its murderous crusades in Syria and elsewhere. I’m not even saying that killing Fakhrizadeh was the right strategy — luckily, I don’t have to make those decisions. I’m saying that the proven genocidal impulses of a murderous regime is highly relevant to any discussion of how it should be treated, how much it should be trusted, whether the original agreement was effective, and whether or not an agreement should eventually “sunset” into the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear bomb. When that part of the story is left out, it’s difficult to trust the rest of the narrative.

Why are some on the left ignoring Iran’s role in the Syrian genocide and how the Obama administration enabled it? Is it because they don’t care about Arab lives, unless they are taken by Westerners? Is it a form of racism — giving Iranians a free pass because they don’t expect them to know better? Is it because Iran has been Netanyahu’s obsession, and no one on the left can stand Netanyahu? Because Obama can do no wrong? Because Syria seems so sad and intractable that Americans would rather close our eyes to the tragedy of what has happened there?

As an Israeli who identifies with much of the left’s agenda on social justice and the environment, I cannot abide by the left’s blind spot when it comes to Iran.

We may never know the answer. But as an Israeli who identifies with much of the left’s agenda on social justice and the environment, I cannot abide by the left’s blind spot when it comes to Iran, no matter if it is an inconvenient truth.

Micha Odenheimer is a writer, rabbi and social entrepreneur and the founder of Tevel b’Tzedek, an Israeli organization working with the extreme poor in the Global South.