Legendary Jewish comic Jackie Mason joined the list of critics of the nuclear deal signed between world powers and Iran Sunday, jesting that New York restaurants face a harsher inspections regime than Iran's nuclear facilities will under the terms of the agreement.

Speaking during an interview to air Sunday night on "Aaron Klein Investigative Radio" on New York's AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia's NewsTalk 990 AM, Mason, an outspoken advocate of Israel, quipped that US Secretary of State John Kerry should pay the American people back for the cost of his airfare to and from the Iran talks.

"This secretary of state, Kerry, negotiated with them for a year-and-a-half and accomplished nothing. He ought to give us back for all the trips he made. He cost us millions of dollars in airplane fares and he came back with nothing except a bad foot."

Mason's comments did not mark the first time he has spoken out on an issue that touched on Israel's security. He emerged during last summer’s Operation Protective Edge as one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders. The long-time Republican has also been highly critical of US President Barack Obama, whom he assailed Sunday for his handling of the Iranian nuclear threat.

"The real agreement he made, I’m sure he (Obama) said to them, 'Listen, could you keep the bomb quiet for a year and a half. Because if you don’t bomb us for a year and a half, I’ll be the big winner. Everyone will see I made a fantastic agreement. If you bomb us after I leave I could always say it’s the other guy’s fault. Because if it’s not for him, this never would have happened," Mason said.

The 84-year-old Mason was ordained as a rabbi at the age of 25, but resigned three years later to follow his dream to be a stand-up comedian. Honing his stand-up skills in the 1950s, he followed the avalanche of other post-World War II Jewish comics – like Milton Berle, Shecky Greene, Alan King and Buddy Hackett – who found a welcome home in the Catskill Mountain resorts favored by Jewish vacationers. They created an ethnic brand of humor that didn’t shy away from confrontation, controversy and improvisation, and paved the way for the biting political style adopted by the counter-culture comics of the 1960s and is still prevalent today in the style of Jewish personalities like Howard Stern and Sarah Silverman.

Mason put his comic chops to use in analyzing the inspection of Iran's nuclear facilities as it is laid out in the deal. “Instant” inspections will only take place 24 days after requested, giving time – he charged – to clean up the site to be inspected.

"First Obama said we can inspect them any time, any place, whenever we please. Now it turns out ‘whenever we please’ except when they don’t allow it.  If they don’t want it it’s up to them. So then we have to wait 28 days [sic] to inspect, as if to say for the 28 days we can trust them completely, because they’ll do nothing. They’ll just hold the bomb in front of us waiting for us to come so they can show it to us. That’s how stupid this negotiation is to us," he said.

"Do you know that in the restaurants of New York, they have an inspection system. You can surprise any restaurant without notice that you can walk in and inspect them… So we are protected in this city from a bad tuna fish.  We’re not protected from a bomb but we’re protected from a bad quality of a tuna fish," Mason joked.

David Brinn contributed to this report.


1a) Kerry Warns: Jews Will Be Blamed If Congress Sinks Iran Deal

By Rafael Medoff



Secretary of State John Kerry's warning that Israel will be "blamed" if Congress opposes the Iran agreement conjures up troubling memories of other instances in which Israel or Jews were warned they might be blamed for international conflicts.

Secretary Kerry made his remark in an address to the Council of Foreign Relations on July 24. He appeared to be not merely predicting that Israel might be blamed, but hinting that the Obama administration itself might do the blaming. And since the administration has repeatedly claimed that rejection of the agreement will lead to war with Iran, the implication of Kerry's statement seems to be that Israel, the Jewish state, would be to blame for such a war.

The possibility that the blame would be extended to Israel's supporters in the United States has already been raised by President Obama himself, in his warning that unnamed "lobbyists" and "money" were trying to block the Iran deal.

One unfortunate comparison brought to mind by this kind of talk is an episode involving the pundit and unsuccessful presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. In the months preceding the first Persian Gulf war, Buchanan charged that "there are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East—the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States." 

In another broadside, Buchanan named four prominent supporters of war with Jewish-sounding names as being part of "the Israeli Defense Ministry's amen corner in the United States." He accused them of planning to send "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown" to the Persian Gulf to do the fighting.
New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal described that remark as a "blood libel," and Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman called Buchanan's statements "an appeal to anti-Semitic bigotry."
Such blame-the-Jews rhetoric was all too common on the eve of World War II.

The U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, reportedly warned one Jewish leader in 1939 that "if the United States is dragged into war with Germany there might even be a pogrom in the U.S.A. itself."
Kennedy addressed a meeting of Hollywood notables, many of them Jews, in November 1940, shortly after the release of Charlie Chaplin's anti-Hitler film, The Great Dictator. According to the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who was present,  Ambassador Kennedy warned them "that the Jews were on the spot, and that they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures"--and if not, "we all, and the Jews in particular would be in jeopardy" for allegedly pushing the U.S. to go to war.

The most infamous attempt to blame Jews for encouraging war was the speech by aviation hero Charles Lindbergh in September 1941. "Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences," Lindbergh menacingly declared. "Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation."
President Obama is no Charles Lindbergh, and Secretary Kerry is no Pat Buchanan. But they and their advisers should be aware by now that using terms that are often codewords for Jews ("lobbyists," "money") and suggesting that Israel or its supporters will be "blamed" for war will inevitably remind many American Jews of profoundly unpleasant episodes from the past.

The debate over the Iran deal needs to be conducted on its merits, and should not be clouded by this kind of inappropriate rhetoric.

Rafael Medoff is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and coeditor of the Online Encyclopedia of America's Response to the Holocaust.
1b)

The Lawless Underpinnings of the Iran Nuclear Deal

The Obama end-run around the Constitution could yet be blocked if states exercise their own sanctions regimes.


By David B. Rivkin Jr. And Lee A. Casey

The Iranian nuclear agreement announced on July 14 is unconstitutional, violates international law and features commitments that President Obama could not lawfully make. However, because of the way the deal was pushed through, the states may be able to derail it by enacting their own Iran sanctions legislation.
President Obama executed the nuclear deal as an executive agreement, not as a treaty. While presidents have used executive agreements to arrange less-important or temporary matters, significant international obligations have always been established through treaties, which require Senate consent by a two-thirds majority.

The Constitution’s division of the treaty-making power between the president and Senate ensured that all major U.S. international undertakings enjoyed broad domestic support. It also enabled the states to make their voices heard through senators when considering treaties—which are constitutionally the “supreme law of the land” and pre-empt state laws.

The Obama administration had help in its end-run around the Constitution. Instead of insisting on compliance with the Senate’s treaty-making prerogatives, Congress enacted the Iran Nuclear Agreement Act of 2015. Known as Corker-Cardin, it surrenders on the constitutional requirement that the president obtain a Senate supermajority to go forward with a major international agreement. Instead, the act effectively requires a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress to block elements of the Iran deal related to U.S. sanctions relief. The act doesn’t require congressional approval for the agreement as a whole.

Last week the U.N. Security Council endorsed the Iran deal. The resolution, adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, legally binds all member states, including the U.S. Given the possibility that Congress could summon a veto-proof majority to block the president’s ability to effect sanctions relief, the administration might be unable to comply with the very international obligations it has created. This is beyond reckless.

On March 11 Secretary of State John Kerry defended the administration’s decision not to take the treaty route with Iran, saying it had “been clear from the beginning we’re not negotiating a legally binding plan.” The Security Council gambit has enabled the administration, without Senate consent, to bind the U.S. under international law.

The U.N. Charter resolution has trapped the U.S. into a position where it can renounce its obligations only at the cost of being branded an international lawbreaker. The president has thus handed the legal high ground to Tehran and made undoing the deal by his successor much more difficult and costly.
Yet the nuclear agreement’s legitimacy in international law is far from clear. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide imposes an affirmative obligation on all convention parties to prevent genocide and threats of genocide. Iran remains publicly committed to Israel’s elimination, an unequivocal threat of genocide in violation of the Convention.

Since nuclear weapons delivered by ballistic missiles are the most likely means by which Iran could implement its genocidal policy, an agreement that calls for lifting the Security Council resolutions banning the sale of ballistic missiles to Iran after eight years—as this nuclear deal does—also seems to contravene the genocide convention.

A further legal complication: Even if Congress doesn’t vote to bar President Obama from lifting sanctions on Iran, the president still wouldn’t be able to deliver fully on the deal’s unprecedented sanctions-lifting commitments. They were promised regardless of any future Iranian aggression in the region, sponsorship of terrorist acts or other misconduct.

Some of the U.S. statutes allow the president to lift certain sanctions on Iran. But many of the most important sanctions—including sanctions against Iran’s central bank—cannot be waived unless the president certifies that Iran has stopped its ballistic-missile program, ceased money-laundering and no longer sponsors international terrorism. He certainly can’t do that now, and nothing in the deal forces Iran to take either step. The Security Council’s blessing of the nuclear agreement has no bearing on these U.S. sanctions.

The administration faces another serious problem because the deal requires the removal of state and local Iran-related sanctions. That would have been all right if Mr. Obama had pursued a treaty with Iran, which would have bound the states, but his executive-agreement approach cannot pre-empt the authority of the states.

That leaves the states free to impose their own Iran-related sanctions, as they have done in the past against South Africa and Burma. The Constitution’s Commerce Clause prevents states from imposing sanctions as broadly as Congress can. Yet states can establish sanctions regimes—like banning state-controlled pension funds from investing in companies doing business with Iran—powerful enough to set off a legal clash over American domestic law and the country’s international obligations. The fallout could prompt the deal to unravel.

For now, though, we are left with another reminder from the administration that brought ObamaCare: Constitutional shortcuts almost invariably lead to bad policy outcomes.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey are constitutional lawyers at Baker Hostetler LLP and served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Mr. Rivkin is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.


1c)
Right from wrong: Eyes wide shut
By RUTHIE BLUM
Kerry insists he was not 'bamboozled' by his Iranian counterparts during negotiations.
On Thursday, US Secretary of State John Kerry spent over four hours trying to defend the nuclear deal before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Grilled by Republicans furious at the Obama administration’s total surrender to Iran, Kerry remained true to character: He doubled down on meaningless platitudes and self-righteous indignation.

In fairness to America’s top diplomat, how else could he respond to rational concerns but to get on his high horse? Indeed, all he had at his disposal in the face of the emerging details of the agreement, each more shocking than the next, was a feeble attempt to invert reality and ridicule his critics in the process.

Referring to a “Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran” commercial aimed at persuading Congress to vote against the agreement and currently airing across the US, Kerry argued, “The alternative to the deal we’ve reached isn’t what we’re seeing ads for on TV. It isn’t a better deal, some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation. That’s a fantasy, plain and simple.”

This was Kerry’s way of insisting that he had not been “bamboozled” by his Iranian counterparts, as Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho) asserted, nor “fleeced,” as committee chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) accused.

In other words, no wool was pulled over his eyes. Not by the Iranians, at any rate. They were clear all along.

And loud, as Kerry can attest, since he was the target of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s repeated abusive outbursts during the negotiations.

No, if Kerry was “bamboozled” or “fleeced” by anyone it was Obama, who told him to secure a deal at any and all costs, because doing so would be better in the short run. As for the long-term repercussions, well, that would be a future administration’s headache.

The way Obama and Kerry both justify the travesty is even less comforting. They claim that since Iran was going to pursue nuclear weapons anyway – and support terrorism anyway, and violate terms anyway, and threaten to wipe Israel off the map anyway, and burn American flags anyway – it would be wiser to join them than beat them.

The logic is mind-boggling. But it does shed light on the administration’s attitude toward Israel.

Obama has been bent on earning the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded – simply for entering the Oval Office – by completing a contract with Iran. Kerry has been obsessed with procuring a document declaring “peace” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in order to become a Nobel laureate himself.

His dreams were dashed, however, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unwilling to cross certain red lines. Though Netanyahu did agree to negotiations, the release of well over 1,000 Palestinian terrorists, a halt in settlement construction, groveling before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a slew of slights from the White House, he refused to commit Israel to suicide.

It is thus that PA President Mahmoud Abbas would not come to the negotiating table. Had the P5+1 countries not given Iran reason to believe that their red lines were merely rhetorical, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Iran’s “supreme leader” in every respect – would not have allowed his puppets to parley with American and European representatives in the first place.

No wonder Obama and Kerry can’t stand Netanyahu.

If the president of the United States can roll over and abdicate to a sworn enemy, who does the prime minister of Israel think he is to remain steadfast? Understanding this is crucial. What it means is that Obama’s camp is right – and Netanyahu’s is wrong – about not having been able to hold out for a “better deal.” Iran, like the Palestinians it supports, has one goal in mind: demolishing the enemy.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will garner enough support in Congress to enable him to veto opposition to the agreement, which gives Iran a carte blanche for its genocidal-weapons development and billions of dollars to bolster global terrorism.

At the moment, it’s not looking good. What’s worse is an annex in the agreement that provides for cooperation between the P5+1 and Iran “to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems.”

This clause is causing a stir in Israel. It was also the focus of a question raised by presidential hopeful Marco Rubio (R-Florida) during the Senate hearing. He wanted to know if it means the US would be required to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from a potential Israeli military strike.

“No,” retorted Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, on hand with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to help Kerry through the ordeal. Rubio was not convinced.

He did issue a warning, however: “The Iranian regime and the world should know that this deal is your deal with Iran... and the next president is under no legal or moral obligation to live up to it.”

What the rest of us need to know is: Which will come first, an Israeli attack or a Republican in the White House? The writer is the web editor of Voice of Israel talk radio (voiceofisrael.com) and a columnist at Israel Hayom
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