On Friday, TNR Contributing Editor and Washington Times national security reporter Eli Lake published a blockbuster scoop about the National Iranian American Council, (NIAC), and it's founder, Trita Parsi. I recently wrote about Parsi's appearance at the J Street conference, where he waived away concerns about the Iranian regime's warnings about destroying Israel and compared such invocations to statements issued by the United States about Iran's nuclear program. Over the past several years, Parsi has built up quite the impressive profile in Washington, earning himself frequent appearances on cable television and on the pages of the nation's top op-ed pages, as well as the kudos of countless "progressive" bloggers, who relish his message of "engagement" with Tehran. In person and in writing, Parsi comes across as serenely reasonable even if the policies for which he advocates -- the lifting of any sanctions on Iran and the striking of a "grand bargain" with the Mullahs -- are actually quite extreme.
Well, it turns out there's a lot more to Parsi than what most people knew (or suspected). First, he isn't even American, which is strange considering the fact that the organization he heads is called the National Iranian American Council and claims to speak on behalf of America's 1 million Iranianis. Furthermore, Parsi admits that his group only has 2,500 to 3,000 members. Internal documents, uncovered by Lake, show that less than 500 people responded to a membership survey that the group put out last year. So, far from representing the views of any appreciable number of Iranian Americans, it is far more accurate to say that NIAC represents the views of Trita Parsi.
But what may really get Parsi into trouble is the accusation that he has been acting for years as an unregistered foreign agent for elements in Iran and, in doing, "may be guilty of violating tax laws, the Foreign Agents Registration Act and lobbying disclosure laws," according to law enforcement authorities whom Lake interviewed. Specifically, Parsi had worked to arrange meetings between Iran's ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. Congressmen:
This week I've been attending the first national conference of J Street, the "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" group which I first wrote about last year. I'm working on a longer piece about the organization's identity crisis that should appear sometime soon, but there have been two events thus far worthy of special note.
First was the speech delivered by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and one of the most prominent liberal Jews in the country. Yoffie, who had initially welcomed J Street's emergence, dramatically broke with the organization over its morally equivocating position on the Gaza War last December. J Street claimed that “While there is nothing ‘right’ in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” These words, the self-proclaimed "dove" replied, were "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve."
So it is perhaps unsurprising that Yoffie was booed at this week's conference for condemning the United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes, known as the "Goldstone Report," as "fatally flawed." Furthermore, he said that "you cannot be a moral agent if you serve an immoral master, and Richard Goldstone should be ashamed of himself for working under the auspices of the U.N. Human Rights Council." This sort of passionate language in defense of Israel and critical of its defamers, unremarkable at mainstream pro-Israel and Jewish conclaves, has been almost entirely absent at this week's J Street conference. Indeed, the greatest applause lines at all of the panels I've attended are those that criticize Israel and lament the fate of the Palestinians. (Allison Hoffman of Tablet has more about the conference attendees's negative reaction to Yoffie).
