February 10th, 2012 Whores For Iranian Terrorists And Other News

Ex-government officials are being paid to shill for terrorists in D.C. This isn’t exactly news, except in the sense that the issue has come to light again because of reports that Israeli intelligence is sponsoring Iranian terrorists who are in turn assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists on behalf of Israel (and, ahem, us.) From the Huffington Post article I link to above:

The MEK’s delisting campaign is funded by a fluid and enigmatic network of support groups based in the United States. According to an MEK leader, these groups are funded by money from around the world, which they deliberately shield from U.S. authorities. These domestic groups book and pay for their VIP speakers through speaker agencies, which in turn pay the speakers directly and take a fee for arranging appearances. That way, the speakers themselves don’t technically accept money from the community groups. If they did, they might discover what their speaker agents surely know: That most of the groups are run by ordinary, middle-class Iranian Americans working out of their homes — people who seem unlikely to have an extra few hundred thousand dollars laying around to pay speaker fees and book five-star hotels to bolster the MEK’s cause.

The speakers are just the type of national-security heavyweights a plaintiff terrorist organization needs. In addition to those named above, the commissioned figureheads include Obama’s recently-departed National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones; former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; onetime State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow and former CIA directors Porter Goss and James R. Woolsey.

Retired military officers are popular — former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark and former Commander in Chief of United States Central Command Gen. Anthony Zinni have both addressed MEK groups. Yet more speakers appear to have been chosen for their deep political ties, such as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former New Mexico Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, former Bush White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and former 9/11 Commission Chairman Lee Hamilton.

Oh, and Howard Dean.

Now, giving speeches on behalf of a group that is officially designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department is apparently not considered “material” support of terrorism (perhaps because the terrorists are actually supporting Dean et al.?) Greenwald (link above) however, lists a few things that are considered material support by the U.S. government:

A Staten Island satellite TV salesman in 2009 wassentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers; a Massachusetts resident, Tarek Mehanna, is being prosecuted now ”for posting pro-jihadist material on the internet”; a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, Jubair Ahmad, was indicted last September for uploading a 5-minute video to YouTube that was highly critical of U.S. actions in the Muslim world, an allegedly criminal act simply because prosecutors claim he discussed the video in advance with the son of a leader of a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba); a Saudi Arabian graduate student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was prosecuted simply for maintaining a website with links “to groups that praised suicide bombings in Chechnya and in Israel” and “jihadist” sites that solicited donations for extremist groups (he was ultimately acquitted); and last July, a 22-year-old former Penn State student and son of an instructor at the school, Emerson Winfield Begolly, was indicted for — in the FBI’s words — “repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans” by posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including “a comment online that praised the shootings” at a Marine Corps base, action which former Obama lawyer Marty Lederman said “does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection.”

So remember that kids; the First Amendment only comes into play when you’re being paid to speak on someone’s behalf.

We must also remember, as Daniel Larison helpfully points out, that terrorism is only TERRORISM (and not “terrorism”) when it’s being conducted by someone we don’t like against someone we do like. When it’s by someone we do like against someone we don’t like, then it’s…not terrorism:

…Israeli state sponsorship of a terrorist group is acceptable because it’s in a good cause. Tobin assures us that this is not just any old cynical “ends justify the means” argument. No, according to him this is “an entirely defensible strategy in which a vicious and tyrannical government’s foes become legitimate allies in what is for all intents and purposes a war.” Never mind that it is “for all intents and purposes a war” because the Israeli government is supporting acts of terrorism against Iranian civilians. Tobin is saying that it would be “immoral” not to partner with a terrorist group to kill Iranian scientists.

In related depressing matters, a plurality of Americans believe that we are justified in attacking Iran to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. A plurality isn’t a majority, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that number has crept up and will continue to creep up as we here more and more about the “danger” of Iran in the media, and as more political figures make hay out the issue to score points in the election season. All this makes sense intuitively, but step back for a moment and just marvel at our astonishing and casual arrogance. Following an entirely unjustified and failed war in Iraq, and in the midst of a difficult and unresolved war in Afghanistan, and with our economy in a delicate and uncertain recovery, there is a large percentage of Americans who think that the wisdom of striking Iran is inarguable. The consequences don’t merit consideration, it is beneath us to consider whether there are non-violent alternatives to ending Iran’s nuclear program, and to consider whether we even have the moral right to strike Iran, and kill hundreds or thousands of Iranians over weapons that will almost certainly never be used against us, is practically un-American. Honestly, it makes me wonder what it must be like to live in a country that doesn’t think (or, God forbid, doesn’t even have the option) to solve its national security issues with force.