Terrorism didn’t win, the people did

Editor's note: The author's name was changed to a pseudonym after publication to protect the author from physical danger that could result from the views presented.

Last week, an intellectually dishonest column entitled “A win for terrorism” was published in The Chronicle. The column misrepresented, misconstrued and, in some cases, outright ignored any semblance of fact while employing a number of dubious double standards in regard to the Iranian nuclear deal. In this rebuttal, I will identify a number of these obfuscations of reality, though I surely will not cover them all in the space allotted.

The author’s case, in short, is that Iran is an international bogeyman less credible and less trustworthy than the civilized nations of the world and that any agreement with the country empowers them in their quest to “terrorize the world,” a clumsy phrase that is nearly as laughable as the title of the column itself. The very first token of evidenced intended to back up this crass accusation is the fact that “Iranian soldiers are employed in Iraq,” which somehow emboldens “groups like ISIS.”

The author conveniently failed to mention, however, that the Iranian soldiers stationed in Iraq are explicitly there to perform military operations against ISIS under the guidance of the Iraqi military. A simple Google search brings up an NPR article stating clearly that Iran is helping Iraqi forces push towards ISIS strongholds in the region; the article states this so clearly, in fact, that it is practically the name of the article. At this point in the war on ISIS, no serious news outlet or persona disputes that Iran is assisting the military fight against ISIS on the ground in measurable, meaningful ways, and to insinuate, by leaving out crucial facts, that Iran is on the ground assisting ISIS is intellectually odious in the most serious way whether done intentionally or out of unavoidable ignorance. If reading about Iran’s global involvement from credible sources while writing an article about Iran’s global involvement was too much to ask, then perhaps this video from MSNBC titled "Iraq launches counter-offensive against ISIS with support from Iran", also easily found with a simple Google search, would have been suitable. Instead, the facts were ignored entirely. The decision to circumvent fact and blatantly mislead ought not to be brooked by The Chronicle or its readers.

The two pieces of evidence refuting the author’s claims were from NPR and MSNBC respectively, neither of which would be described as pro-Iranian screeds by any competent person. The issue of reputable sources is important and certainly so in The Chronicle’s columns. For instance, the author presents to us as fact that “human rights activists and journalists” alike are “in agreement” that the deal will lead to a more repressive Iran. To credit this claim, he offers us an article from the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli daily that is generally considered center-right and is in no way an outlet that would seek to credit the Iran deal as worthy or hopeful. I don’t go to Hamas’s propaganda sites or the Ayatollah’s twitter page to get my news about Israel, and I don’t go to the Jerusalem Post to get unbiased news about Iran. Not to mention the fact that the most notable opinion column I’ve ever seen from the Jerusalem Post was titled “Support the Civilized Man” and contained this passage: “The world ignores wars fought between savages. Just look at Syria. Look at Africa. IT IS this savage culture that the Western world is trying to appease. And it will fail.” Given that the columnists at the Jerusalem Post think this way about “savages” (which one can be sure includes the people of Iran), perhaps it is not the outlet we should look to for clear, balanced analysis on Iran or much else for that matter. Furthermore, for there to be such widespread agreement about how dark and ruthless a place Iran will be after this deal, average Iranians sure seem happy about it. Hopeful voices weren’t hard to find, especially from Iranian journalists, but it’s hard to find those voices in the Jerusalem Post. Nader Hashemi, an Iranian writer for CNN, put it very clearly: “The agreement is good for the Iranian people.”

Aside from the blatant disregard for facts and willingness to use faulty sources to further his argument, there is also a pallid double standard applied by Jacob to Iran in the column. Toward the end of the column, Jacob claims that “as an American,” he is not “content with buying safety from a country that openly finances the killing of innocent people.” Somehow, we’re subjected to this moral parading only on the subject of Iran. The same people who warn us of the dangers of supporting such a vile, murderous regime are curiously quiet on the subject of innocent civilians killed by the US and its allies. For instance, very few of the people lambasting this deal are as quick to speak up in opposition to the billions of dollars in military aid sent every year by the US to Israel despite the fact that this aid “directly finances the killing of innocent people” in Gaza, where Israel killed almost 1,500 civilians, 521 of whom were children, last summer alone. Nor do the same folks speak out against President Barack Obama’s continued financial support of Egypt’s bloody Sisi regime, which has imprisoned and killed its own citizens en masse. Similarly, the U.S. is often exempt from such criticisms despite the fact that it has killed more civilians than any other country since the beginning of the new millennium and has now killed more than one million Muslims alone, and that’s by the most conservative estimates. This double standard is moral grandstanding of the worst kind. I’d inquire as to the metric by which the author gauges the value of civilian deaths: Are Palestinian innocents, for example, worth inherently less than others, or does the worth of a dead body impinge upon who killed it? If the problem with the Iran deal is supporting a regime that finances the death of civilians, be consistent with your outrage.

Jacob’s column is written with a callous, racist disregard for the simple fact that Iranians are human beings who operate like human beings, not like Islamist robots bowing at the feet of the largely unpopular Ayatollah. There is a bigoted assumption presented as fact that every dollar freed up by the easing of sanctions will go toward furthering Iran’s sadistic desire for an intergalactic Shia caliphate, ignoring the fact that most Iranians are excited about ending their exclusion from the international community and starting a new beginning for a nation with a rich culture and history. I’ll reiterate Nader Hashemi when I say that this agreement is good for the Iranian people, not because they’ll send an extra aid package to Assad, but because it’ll be easier for them to get jobs and feed their children. Iranians have said as much; it’s time we stop speaking over them and start listening.