Iran, Saudi, and the Abraham Accords

Dear Colleagues,

Joe Kawly is interviewing Shirin Ebadi tomorrow for an episode of Joseph Kawly’s The Diplomat. The lawyer, human rights advocate, and Nobel Laureate has lived in exile in London since 2009.

Shirin — whom I’ve known since running a London public policy institute and RFE/RL in Prague— was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work on women’s and children’s rights in Iran. I’m grateful to Joe for securing the interview.

Shirin drafted the text of a law establishing a woman’s right to divorce her husband. She presented the bill before the Islamic Republic’s Parliament, but was forced by male lawmakers to leave the chamber before the bill could be considered.

Shirin represented the case of Arian Golshani, a child beaten to death by her father and stepbrother. She took up the cause of an 11-year-old girl named Leila Fathi who was gang-raped and murdered by three men after she left her village in the mountains one day to pick wild flowers.

In summer 2008, Tehran’s clerical regime attacked her for defending gays, for appearing in public abroad without a head scarf, and for links to the Bahái faith. Shirin, a Shiite, had agreed to represent the families of seven Baháʼís arrested in May. In December of that year, Iranian police shut down the office of her human rights NGO. A month earlier, her Peace Prize medal, law diploma, and a ring received from a German association of journalists had been seized by authorities.

Iran, Human Rights, and Independent Media

The human rights situation in Iran is worsening. Some 1,500 people have been arrested over the past two weeks, including journalists, poets, musicians, human rights advocates, and members of religious and ethnic minorities. Hundreds more have been detained since Israel and the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities.

Here’s the English Language version of work we’ve done on the crackdown on dissent and roundup of Iranian Jews. Sham trials and executions are underway.

We’ve invited Roya Hakakian to speak to the next meeting of MBN’s young professionals program. Roya is an Iranian-American poet, essayist, and human rights advocate living in New York.

We’ve invited New York-based Summer Lopez for a young professionals discussion as well. Summer is CEO of PEN America, a branch of the renowned international writers association founded in London in 1921.

We’re inviting producers of the Emmy Award winning series Tehran to speak to a session of our young professionals. The 2020 espionage thriller series involves the story of twenty-six-year old Mossad agent Tamar Rabinyan — born to a Jewish family in Isfahan, raised in Israel — who is dispatched back to Iran to help neutralize the regime’s nuclear program.

Saudi, Syria, and the Abraham Accords

We’re following the Abraham Accords. First signed in 2020, there seems to be renewed momentum toward new agreements with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets President Trump tomorrow.

We’re keeping an eye on the prospects for a Gaza ceasefire — and for Saudi Arabia, and perhaps even Syria, to take steps toward diplomatic normalization with the Jewish state.

For a wide lens on regional developments, listen to the recent interview with MBN board members Ryan Crocker and Susan Ziadeh, both former ambassadors posted in the region (Susan in Qatar; Ryan in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Kuwait).

America’s Voice, MBN’s future

Amidst intense competition — China, Russia, and Iran invest considerable sums — MBN is the only U.S.-funded Arabic language media outlet serving the Middle East and North Africa.

With honest, credible, professional journalism our work helps to advance broad U.S. foreign policy goals. U.S.-funded international media trump the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries.

Together with RealClearPolitic’s Andy Walworth, former U.S. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Jim Glassman, and former New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shankar, I’ll speak on July 16 about MBN and America’s voice in the world. Thom leads the program for Media and National Security at George Washington University and hosts next week’s event.

Rob Coalson has just interviewed me on MBN and the future of U.S.-funded international media for Greg Feifer’s Compass, a new online journal published by the Institute of Current World Affairs. Greg serves as ICWA executive director (I’ll share a link once the interview is posted).

The MBN Fight

Kari Lake’s United States Agency for Global Media has caused irreparable damage to MBN and its employees. Ms. Lake’s June 25 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee was disappointing, to put it mildly.

It’s not accurate, for example, when Ms. Lake tells Congress she will not meet with me or the CEOs of RFA and RFE/RL because we’re suing her. We were eager to meet when Ms. Lake assumed her role as senior adviser at USAGM in early March. We were determined to meet with her when, barely two weeks on the job, she unlawfully terminated our grant agreements.

Only later and reluctantly did we seek legal recourse when it became clear that Ms. Lake had no intention in releasing our Congressionally appropriated funds.

We’d love nothing more than to meet with her today. It might put an end to the waste of taxpayer money at USAGM. In a sole-source agreement worth $250,000, Ms. Lake has hired a company called the Ragnar Group to audit MBN, RFA, and RFE/RL. We’re already heavily audited.

It’s unclear how Ragnar relates to DOGE, or whether the so-called Department of Government Efficiency still nests inside our parent agency. It’s been more than a month since I wrote to the Ragnar Group requesting a meeting. There’s still no reply.

Coda

Greg Feifer’s Compass has an interesting essay on Franz Kafka’s The Trial. A century later and that nightmarishly bizarre, opaque, and irrational quality known as “Kafkaesque” has still not lost relevance.

I keep bumping into Kafka, as a graduate student in the U.S., in Prague where Kafka was born. I lived in Kafka’s street, Maiselova, in the Jewish Quarter in Old Town.

In The Trial, bank clerk Josef K. is arrested without explanation. Josef spends a year consulting lawyers, trying to navigate an impossibly dense bureaucratic and legal system before he is executed for a crime that’s never been revealed.

Egyptian intellectuals Georges Henein and Taha Hussein discovered Kafka in the late 1930s. Authors in the region began to identify with Kafka’s literature and with Joseph K., the protagonist in The Trial, in particular.

One finds the Kafkaesque in parts of Shirin Ebadi’s memoirs as she recounts life under the Mullahs. Here’s one passage: 

The scariest things [was] the caprice with which the state chose its victims. Perhaps this was precisely the mission: to terrorize the intellectual and literary circles of Tehran so thoroughly that no one would dare raise their voice in criticism. … We gathered frequently in those days, squinting into the tea leaves, trying to discern a pattern or a reason in the choice of targets.

Sincerely, Jeff