Israel Escalates Tension With Iran – OpEd

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By all accounts, the Israeli government is deliberately provoking a major escalation of tensions with Iran and, at the same time. going into disinformation overdrive with less than two weeks to May 12th decision date by US President Donald Trump on the fate of the Iran nuclear accord. It is a desperate race against time, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparing no stone untouched in his frenzied effort to smear and vilify Iran.

Thus, within 24 hours of suspected Israeli missile strikes at Syrian military targets in Homs and Aleppo, Netanyahu grabbed the world media’s limelight by disclosing with much fanfare Israel’s supposed major intelligence breakthrough, by getting hold of literally tons of secret documents from inside Iran proving that the country has actively pursued nuclear weapons. There must have been several truckloads ferrying the literally thousands of files, in fact 100,000 according to Netanyahu, from Tehran to Tel Aviv! Or, perhaps Iran’s revolutionary guards obliged Mr. Netanyahu and the Mossad by making sure no Iranian nuclear secret is not left protected and Netanyahu has a huge warehouse of treasure troves of Iran’s top nuclear secrets.

But, of course this is sheer nonsense, a tissue of Israeli disinformation or “fake news” instantly embraced and praised by Trump for a job well-done. Perhaps both Netanyahu and Trump on counting on the gullible Western media (and public) to adopt their big lies and thus score a public relations coup at a delicate time, but hopefully the international community knows better than to toe Netanyahu’s tension strategy with Iran.

Lest we forget, Netanyahu’s latest shenanigan follows a visit by the new US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a close friend of the ultra-Zionist Sheldon Adelson with a horrendous Iranophobic record, who has wasted little time in upping the ante against Iran, despite the fact that the European governments have all but rebuffed White House’s quest to renegotiate the Iran deal, in light of the strong pro-JCPOA statement by UK, Germany, and France the other day, followed by the Putin-Macron statement on the need to preserve the agreement. Essentially, tis means that the US provocations against the nuclear deal have failed to convince anyone in the global community and now Mr. Netanyahu seeks to give it another try by concocting the tens of thousands of fake evidence against Iran. The master propagandist is undoubtedly deluding himself if he thinks that any credible nuclear expert or policy-maker will endorse his incessant lies and lend credibility to his accusations — that are pathetically familiar and ring hollow through and through.

But, clearly with his media blitz aforementioned, Netanyahu has at least managed to deflect attention from Israel’s on-going atrocities against the Palestinian people, which has also received White House’s backing, i.e., another moral outrage by global standards. In this bottomless pit only the demons of falsehood swarm.

Kaveh L. Afrasiabi

Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Ph.D. is an Iranian-American political scientist and author specializing in Iran’s foreign and nuclear affairs, and author of several books.

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