Ex-Obama Staffers, Iran Deal Promoters Push Wild Anti-Israel Conspiracies

In the wake of Netanyahu’s bombshell revelations about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, proponents of the 2015 deal with Tehran launched bizarre accusations against Israel and the Trump administration, with some bordering on anti-Semitism.

By: Ezra Stone, United with Israel

Former US President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, were among the world’s biggest promoters of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which lifted crippling economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic in exchange for what Israelis across the political spectrum saw as a very dangerous agreement.

The deal was eventually rammed through, accompanied by repeated statements from Iran’s leaders that it had neither intended to, nor begun, developing nuclear weapons.

Those claims were shown to be lies this week when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that Israel’s Mossad intelligence service had successfully captured half a ton of hard evidence proving the existence of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.

In a presentation to the international community summarizing this information, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set about proving the existence of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program. Netanyahu summed it up in two words: “Iran lied.”

Proponents of the deal, however, are now resorting to defending the agreement using baseless accusations and wild conspiracy theories against Israel and the Trump administration, according to a recent report by Tablet.

Consider, for instance, the comments of ex-Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor, who accused President Donald Trump of “cooking up intel with the Israelis to push us closer to a conflict with Iran.”

Vietor served as former National Security Council spokesperson for Obama and provided no evidence that any of the documents that Netanyahu presented had been fabricated.

Baseless Accusations, No Facts

Another conspiracy theory is that Israel “hacked” International the Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) files.

Among the pushers of this theory are Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, and Trita Parsi, director of the National Iranian American Council, reported Tablet.

Vaez claimed that Israel “probably hacked the @iaeaorg and gathered some new details from what Iran responded to the agency to close the outstanding issues in 2015,” while Parsi tweeted, “As others have suggested, seems like Mossad raided the IAEA and not Tehran.”

Hacking the IAEA is apparently a more palatable possibility for these two than the Mossad’s actual intelligence-gathering, which consisted of a daring operation involving removal of the documents from locked Iranian facilities.

Yet another line of attack on Israel and the current US government was launched by Joe Cirincione, president of a Washington foundation called the Ploughshares Fund, which had helped orchestrate Obama’s campaign to convince the American public to swallow the Iran deal.

Instead of addressing the substance of Israel’s evidence against Iran, Cirincione instead accused Israel of harboring “a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program” and “consistently [lying] to US officials when confronted with the evidence.”

Reactions Mean ‘Deep Trouble’

Perhaps the most outrageous theory, bordering on anti-Semitism, was suggested by Reza Marashi, former State Department staffer and current research director of the National Iranian American Council, who tweeted, “Mike Pompeo in Israel to find out what [US] foreign policy will be.”

Conspiracies about Israeli interests controlling the US government echo a myriad of anti-Semitic tropes, including the canard that Jews secretly control public institutions, the media and world banks.

According to the Tablet report, “When the reaction of our so-called experts is to deny an actual Iranian conspiracy by accusing Israel of fake ones, we are all in deep trouble.”

In the ensuing years after the deal was made, Iran has continued to destabilize the region, funding Islamic terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, fomenting civil war in Yemen, testing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and amassing troops and weapons in Syria while threatening to destroy that nation’s neighbor to the west, Israel.