US lawmakers unite to demonize
Iran By Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON - Last Thursday afternoon, in a
tightly packed press room of the US Capitol
building, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi stood at the
podium and smiled heartily as she pointed to two
columns of mailboxes stacked behind her.
"Since Iran funds death," she told the
crowd, her lobby group - The Israel Project (TIP)
- was collecting petitions demanding that economic
pressure and sanctions be brought against Iran for
its refusal to halt its nuclear program and its
alleged continued
support for terrorism.
The "threat of Iran" and the need to
confront the regime has become a mainstream view
in the US legislature, attracting support from
Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike.
As the administration of President George
W Bush pushes its international allies to back a
more rigid sanctions regime against Tehran, lobby
groups such as TIP, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee and the neo-conservative
think-tank Center for Security Policy (CSP) have
spearheaded a grassroots campaign to divest in
companies that do business with countries that the
State Department considers state sponsors of
terrorism.
"Terror-free investing is an
idea whose time has come," wrote Frank Gaffney,
president of CSP, in a March op-ed in the
Washington Times.
TIP "fights the war of
words and images" to provide a "more positive
public face of Israel", according to the
organization's website. Mizrahi's lobby group may
only be three years old, but it has already
attracted strong support from high-profile
Congress members such as Senators Evan Bayh of
Indiana and Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania, both of
whom sit on its board of advisers.
TIP's
press conference was striking for the strong
written statements of support issued by more than
13 presidential candidates, including Democratic
Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
"Allowing Iran, a radical theocracy that
supports terrorism and openly threatens its
neighbors, to acquire nuclear weapons is a risk we
cannot take," said Obama in a statement read aloud
to reporters. "All nations need to understand
that, while Iran's most explicit and intolerable
threats are aimed at Israel, its conduct threatens
all of us."
Obama recently introduced the
Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, one of several bills
making its way through Congress that calls for
stiffer economic sanctions on Iran's energy
industry and countries that do business with Iran.
Clinton said: "We cannot permit Iran to
build or acquire nuclear weapons. We must also not
let go unanswered its state sponsorship of
terrorism. We must not stand silent in the face of
brutal repression of women and minorities. And we
must not tolerate threats to the existence of
Israel."
In her statement, Clinton also
plugged her sponsorship of Senate legislation
aimed at closing loopholes enabling international
corporations to evade sanctions through foreign
subsidiaries.
The "Divest Iran" campaign
has gained momentum in part as an alternative for
lawmakers wary of a direct military confrontation
with Iran.
"The record shows diplomacy can
be more successful than you think even if they
have had a nuclear test," said Republican
Congressman Marc Kirk. "There is an elegant policy
road that exists for us to bring about a peaceful
solution."
Kirk also recently introduced a
bill in the House of Representatives aimed at
companies and countries that provide gasoline to
the Iranian regime, in effect resulting in a
"quarantine on gasoline sales".
While Iran
is one of the world's largest exporters of crude
oil, its refining capacity is severely limited,
and the government has been forced to import about
40% of its gasoline from abroad while offering its
citizens the highest subsidies on gasoline in the
Middle East.
Most lawmakers in attendance
preferred the deliberate ambiguity of leaving the
military option "on the table" rather than direct
military threats, yet they fiercely condemned Iran
and questioned the mental stability of President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
While the president of
Iran exercises nominal power (the de facto head of
the executive branch is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei),
Ahmadinejad's pronouncements have raised his
political profile while drawing heavy
international criticism. In the rhetoric of US
lawmakers, he is represented as an unstable
religious radical who denies the Holocaust (in
December 2005 Ahmadinejad was internationally
denounced when he called the Holocaust a "myth", a
statement that official Iran news agencies deleted
from transcripts of the speech in a fruitless
attempt at damage control) and is "only a couple
deviations away from total insanity", according to
Congressman Brad Sherman.
Elliot Engel, a
New York congressman who also sits on TIP's board
of advisers, said: "This is our Munich. We need to
stand up to Iran and tell them they cannot thumb
their noses at world opinion."
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
