Mark Dubowitz2013-06-19T07:26:59-04:00Mark Dubowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=mark-dubowitzCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Mark DubowitzGood old fashioned elbow grease.Why Has Canada Not Yet Banned Iran's Terrorist Organization?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10829082011-11-09T09:26:15-05:002012-01-09T05:12:02-05:00Mark Dubowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-dubowitz/
The International Atomic Energy Agency made its announcement only days after the United States foiled an Iranian plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington, along with dozens of innocent bystanders, on American soil. The case implicated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its overseas operation branch, the Quds Force. The IRGC thrives in significant part because only the U.S. has designated the organization as a whole for its role in terrorism and in building Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
To its credit, the Canadian government has not taken the Iranian threat lightly. Yet Ottawa has not yet outlawed the entity that directs both Iran's nuclear program and the many terrorist acts Tehran sponsors around the world. Designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization would represent a small policy change with a big impact.
Canada's Criminal Code empowers the federal Cabinet to establish a list of designated terrorist entities. Such a designation makes it a criminal offense for any Canadian citizen or resident to engage in financial dealings with a listed entity, or participate in, contribute to, facilitate or enhance its activities. Terrorist designations also obligate banks and other companies to ensure that they have no involvement in any assets held or controlled by a listed entity.
There are already over 40 terrorist entities on the Canadian list including al-Qaeda itself, as well as Iran's terrorist proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Jihad. Yet the IRGC, which has engaged in assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings from Afghanistan to Argentina, and provided funding, weapons, training, and intelligence to militant groups from the Middle East and Europe to the Americas, remains curiously absent.
The U.S., European Union, and United Nations have already applied various sanctions against the IRGC and its individual leaders. In 2007, the U.S. designated the IRGC in its entirety as a terrorist entity. Europe, the U.N., and Canada have designated entities and persons related to the IRGC, but avoided a blanket designation. The Liberal Party of Canada, Dutch parliamentarians, and a committee of British members of Parliament, have all advocated banning the IRGC in its entirety. It is time for the governing Conservatives, now with a majority Parliament, to take action.
If and when Canada acts, other countries -- perhaps benefiting from political cover from precedent by a country that is not the United States -- may be more likely to follow its lead, resulting in increased pressure on companies around the world to limit any financial dealings with the IRGC.
The IRGC is not just a political or military organization. It is also, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, an IRGC expert and the author of The Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate which is a dominant player in Iran's economy, especially in its critical energy industry. It is also heavily involved in the sale of Iranian oil to international companies, which accounts for 75 per cent of the Iranian government budget and 80 per cent of hard-currency export earnings.
The IRGC has serious commercial interests, and would be detrimentally impacted by the legally imposed curtailment of business dealings with companies and financial institutions.
Victor Comras, a former State Department and U.N. sanctions expert, predicts that this measure, if implemented by multiple countries, "would severely impact Iran's leadership class."
Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, adds: "Iran's leaders in fact devote much of their efforts to lining their own pockets -- fighting more often and viciously to protect their incomes than their ideas."
In other words, IRGC members are not solely religious zealots without material interests. If those material interests are targeted, it could intensify the fissures within the regime, and between the IRGC and other regime elements.
This infighting is already on display between Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, between the IRGC and those around the Iranian president, and between those IRGC commanders enjoying the spoils and those who aren't. This is worth encouraging: An enemy at war with itself is a weakened enemy.
Canada has taken useful but mostly incremental and symbolic steps against the Iranian regime. With a Controlled Engagement Policy firmly in place, Ottawa limits its official contact with Iran primarily to discussions about Tehran's human rights violations and illegal nuclear activities. Canada has also implemented UN Security Council Resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran for failing to fulfill its international nuclear obligations. Moreover, Canada has drawn on its own domestic legislation, the Special Economic Measures Act, to apply additional pressure with bilateral trade restrictive measures against Iran, targeted at constraining its nuclear program and thwarting WMD proliferation.
With Iran possibly on the brink of acquiring nuclear capability, however, the time for incremental measures against the custodians of those nuclear weapons is over. Canada should list the IRGC as a terrorist entity without further delay. ]]>Iran's War on Religious Freedomtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10006812011-10-13T12:19:27-04:002011-12-13T05:12:01-05:00Mark Dubowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-dubowitz/
The possible execution of Iranian Christian cleric Youcef Nadarkhani for questioning Islam as the dominant form of religious instruction in Iran reveals a vastly under-reported crackdown that has resulted in the arrests of over 300 Christians since 2010.
The death penalty Nadarkhani could face is the latest in a soul-numbing human rights record that should make every European company doing business with the Iranian regime hope that there will not be an earthly or heavenly day of reckoning.
While Iran's regime, ever creative in brutalizing its people, dropped the "apostasy" charge in response to Western outrage, it accused Nadarkhani of rape and espionage. "His crime is not, as some claim, converting others to Christianity. He is guilty of security-related crimes...[and] is a Zionist," Gholomali Rezvani, the deputy governor of Gilan province told the regime-controlled Fars News Agency.
It is a common practice of Iran's judicial system to manufacture new charges to blunt rising international criticism of its repressive practices. In 2010, an Iranian court in the province of Gilan convicted Nadarkhani and sentenced him for apparently questioning the fairness of state laws compelling his child to learn Islam in school. He was arrested and incarcerated on Oct. 13, 2009. In the past few days, as a possible response to international outrage over the case, Iran's Supreme Court has ordered a new trial at which Nadarkhani once again will face an Iranian judiciary not known for meting out justice.
Nadarkhani, who is in his early 30s, embraced Christianity at the age of 19 and organized an underground church in his hometown of Rasht to hide his religious devotion from a state-orchestrated campaign of anti-Christian repression.
According to Iranian court documents, Nadarkhani "has stated that he is a Christian and no longer Muslim. During many sessions in court in the presence of his attorney and a judge, he has been sentenced to execution by hanging according to article 8 of Tahrir-ol Vasileh." (Tahrir-ol Vasileh is a book authored by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the godfather of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as a guide for how Muslims should live and behave).
According to Amnesty International, Nadarkhani told the judge at his trial that he would not renounce his faith to save his life: "I am resolute in my faith and Christianity and have no wish to recant."
Mr. Nadarkhani was a priest of a church run out of his home. Dr. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, an expert on Iranian religious groups at the Brussels-based European Foundation for Democracy, estimates that there are 40,000 members of underground churches in the Iran, adding that some "Christians speak even about 500,000 new converts."
The U.S. State Department's 2010 International Religious Freedom Report notes that Iran is home to 300,000 Christians, most of whom are ethnic Armenians.
Sadly, too many European politicians court Iran's regime and misrepresent the state of religious freedom in Iran. Last October, a cross section of German parliamentarians, ranging from the Social Democrats to the Greens to the Christian Social Union and Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, visited Iran.
During their almost one-week stay in Iran, the German deputies uttered not a single word about Iran's religious repression. Peter Gauweiler, the deputy who headed the parliamentary group, even praised Iran for allowing Christian churches to flourish in the Islamic Republic.
What is to be done?
The U.S., Canada and the European Union must accelerate the pace of designations of Iranian officials involved in human rights abuses, including religious repression. They should impose lifetime travel bans on these Iranian officials instead of the temporary bans that they too often lift when officials travel on government business.
Assets of sanctioned human rights abusers should be immediately seized. Iranian officials travel regularly to Europe and Canada, and are thought to have billions of dollars in assets in European and Canadian banks. Canada is reportedly a favorite destination for Iranian officials' money, as its bank secrecy laws enable them to prevent authorities from tracing and seizing their assets.
The United States and its allies also should see to it that any Iranian official sanctioned for human rights abuses receives more attention than a single press release. Senior government officials should announce human rights sanctions at high-profile press conferences and release photos of the abusers along with details of their crimes. This may help increase the "name and shame" value of these penalties.
It is not too late for Washington and its allies to save Nadarkhani, but they need to move beyond mere outrage and symbolic measures to stop Tehran's assault on the liberty and dignity of the Iranian people.]]>Iran Terror Plot: Will America Finally Respond?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10057572011-10-11T16:45:07-04:002011-12-11T05:12:01-05:00Mark Dubowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-dubowitz/
The operation was likely authorized at the highest levels of the Iranian government. The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei controls the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and The Quds Force, the special unit of the IRGC implicated in this operation. Khamenei has massively increased their military and economic power and their overseas operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. This was not a "rogue" operation.
From my colleague FDD Senior Fellow Emanuele Ottolenghi in Brussels, the author of a new book on the IRGC:
"The Quds Force is the regime's long arm abroad. They are involved in training terror groups abroad and supporting Iran's proxies financially and militarily. They are also directly responsible for a number of terror outrages abroad. They often operate from Iranian embassies, disguised as menial workers, administrative personnel or lowly diplomats.
They are part of the IRGC, hence they are bound by an oath of loyalty to the Supreme Leader. The decision to carry out such an attack is usually taken by or given approval by the final authority of the Supreme Leader himself. There is no question about where ultimate responsibility lies for this plot.
A plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in DC and blow up the Israeli embassy -- this is not something that 'a rogue element' has decided to carry out to undermine some supposed moderate camp that simply does not exist...This is something decided and approved from the highest echelons of the state and carried out with the active cooperation of Iranian embassies and missions abroad, possibly even in the US -- I would not be surprised if there were Qods agents seconded to Iran's mission to the UN."
For those who have followed the decades-long ties between Iran, the IRGC, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, and their cooperation in the killing of Americans, this escalation should not be a surprise. What will be a surprise to the Iranian regime is if the United States, in the face of a brazen attack on its capital, finally responds decisively.
]]>My Dual Loyalties Problemtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9768882011-10-01T07:00:48-04:002011-12-01T05:12:01-05:00Mark Dubowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-dubowitz/
The problem first revealed itself during the last Winter Olympics. On Feb. 28, 2010, 200 witnesses at a Maryland pub saw me stand up and cheer as Sidney Crosby scored in overtime to give Canada the gold medal against the U.S. men's Olympic team. Two hundred people who F.B.I. agents doing a security check might contact one day to check on my patriotic bona fides if I'm ever fortunate enough to be called for U.S. government service. The greatest hockey match of all time -- yes, even greater than when the USA beat the USSR in "the miracle on ice" in 1980 -- made me reflect on my identity and America's.
Now, with a new hockey season ramping up, I'm terrified that this will be an issue once more.
I'm a Canadian living in Washington, D.C., with a green card and an American-born son. I've loved the United States since I was a kid growing up in South Africa. My second grade teacher once called my parents to complain about my excessive pro-American sentiment (1976 was a tough year to be an American partisan). "Mrs. Dubowitz, I know that America has the biggest army and economy but, please tell him to stop. Mark is being very disruptive in my class."
At the time, my folks were deciding between immigration to Chicago or Toronto. Since my dad wasn't a Jimmy Carter fan, he chose the Great White North only to question his decision when Reagan won four years later (it took me an additional two years to figure out that, much to my dismay, Canada wasn't an American state).
Canada has been very, very good to the family and, on my round-the-world travels, I've proudly worn the maple leaf on my backpack as an affirmation and not just to avoid getting accused of being a Yank. So when it came time to decide whom to support in this gold medal match, I had divided loyalties. Hockey is in my blood not by birth but by transfusion. As an eight-year-old boy and new immigrant, I was looking for acceptance despite a thick South African accent and immigrant parents.
Then and now, hockey has been a means for me to emotionally gain entry to a foreign land -- a sporting way for a man to fortify the ideas and habits that define patriotism.
As a Washingtonian, I've become a die-hard Caps fan supporting the fabulous Russian Alexanders (Ovechkin and Semin) as they fight for Washington's sports pride, which has brought regular season elation and playoff heartbreak.
A Canadian living in America rooting for Russians -- see how quickly that security clearance is slipping away. I've also lost a few Toronto friends for my traitorous abandonment of the Leafs.
But all these things in me -- and no doubt countless others -- have produced a powerful cocktail of American patriotism. There was no contradiction whatsoever for an American patriot to cheer loudly when Team Canada, the better team, defeated the younger, American upstarts, or when my Russian hockey stars, beginning their new season on Oct. 8, skate circles around their American and Canadian opponents.
The idea of America is so big, so embracing, and so fundamentally liberal in its imagination that it permits a miscreant like me to root for Canucks and Russkies. This is indeed an affirmation of America's greatness and part of my natural, smooth evolution -- South Africa, Canada, America -- because it's a liberal, and Anglo-Saxon, voyage.
Whether or not that's good enough for the F.B.I., I'm confident that the liberal, inclusive nature of America will permit me to remain a passionate pro-American while supporting Canada in the next Olympics -- and praying for a Stanley Cup lifted in the air by a Russian should that inshallah come to pass.
]]>Why Isn't Ahmadinejad on a No-Fly List?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9718222011-09-20T13:15:55-04:002011-11-20T05:12:02-05:00Mark Dubowitzhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-dubowitz/
Their presence in the United States makes a mockery of the international sanctions regime that the Obama administration has so skillfully constructed.
As Ahmadinejad testifies before the UN, his government continues to provide money, intelligence, cyber experts to shut down dissident communications, and reportedly even detachments of snipers to prop up Bashar Assad's regime as it guns down democratic protesters in Syria.
Ahmadinejad ascended to Iran's presidency through the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, arguably the world's most deadly terrorist organization. Through the IRGC, Tehran has waged a low-intensity war on the United States for over 30 years. In 1983, Iranian proxy Hezbollah bombed a Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen. In 1996, a group with Iranian ties bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen. Throughout the 1990s, and perhaps leading up to 9/11, Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's terrorist mastermind, worked as Iran's liaison with al Qaeda providing training on mass casualty attacks.
Today, Iran continues to support terrorist groups ranging from Hezbollah to the Palestinian Sunni groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as Shiite militias in Iraq, and lately even its erstwhile enemies the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Revolutionary Guards control the economy of an oil-rich nation, travel abroad on diplomatic passports, and hide their operatives in Iranian embassies all over the world. The Guards also enjoy full representation at the UN, OPEC and other international bodies. Sanctioned Guards commander Rostam Qasemi currently serves as OPEC's president, and will be attending the organization's meetings in Vienna.
Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the current head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, is also subject to international sanctions, but also travels regularly to meetings in Vienna. The U.S. and EU pass travel bans to great fanfare, yet ignore them completely when sanctioned officials travel to meetings of international organizations. As Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL), a congressional leader on Iran issues, wrote in an Aug. 11 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, these measures are meaningless if loopholes allow sanctioned Iranian officials to travel freely.
Congressman Deutch has urged the Obama administration to use current U.S. sanctions laws to prohibit any company from providing fuel to the aircraft that would enable Qasemi's air travel to and from Vienna. These same laws should be used to sanction companies refueling the aircrafts Ahmadinejad and Salehi use to fly to and from New York next week.
Ahmadinejad himself is not under U.S., European or international sanctions, despite his role in presiding over a six-year reign of terror, featuring widespread human rights abuses, the acceleration of Iran's nuclear weapons program, and the killing of U.S. and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan -- not to mention hundreds or perhaps even thousands of civilians.
If the United States and Europe finally stood up and sanctioned the dictator of Damascus for slaughtering his own people, why can't they do the same to the man propping him up?
More than 30 years after Iran declared war on the United States -- and only days after the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks -- Washington must recognize the centrality of the Iranian threat, and move more aggressively to counter it.
Sanctioning Ahmadinejad and keeping him and his henchmen out of New York would be a start.]]>