As Iranians headed to the polls on Friday to vote for a new president, an explosive new report exposed how the regime in Tehran has used a “shadowy arm” of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, to routinely “rig” Iran’s elections.

Using insider documents from the IRGC, the report by the advocacy organization United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) detailed how Iran’s so-called “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, established a new entity known as the Baqiatallah Headquarters to ensure election outcomes — including for the presidency — that match his Islamist, authoritarian agenda of removing any traces of Western influence from Iranian society.

Khamenei tasked the hardline former commander of the IRGC, Mohammad Ali Jafari, to lead the little-known department at the center of the regime’s “election engineering” and broader efforts to usher in a messianic “new Islamic civilization.” Before overseeing the Baqiatallah Headquarters, Jafari was responsible for expanding the IRGC’s “security and military capabilities, consolidating the IRGC’s asymmetric warfare capabilities to deter the likelihood of US military strikes, and brutally suppressing anti-regime protests,” according to the report.

The IRGC’s Baqiatallah Headquarters is so valued by Khamenei, the authors note, that it reports directly to him and “has the authority to demand the full use of other agencies’ capacities and resources.”

More importantly, however, according to the report, is the office’s “unique overarching strategy,” known as the “Middle Ring” strategy, of selecting and organizing members of the Iranian youth into local small groups tasked with executing “political and cultural operations” on behalf of the regime’s elite. Members of these small groups receive unparalleled access to the “upper echelons of power” in Iran such as the Office of the Supreme Leader.

“In essence, this entire [Middle Ring] strategy seeks to organize, mobilize, and empower the small but radical support base of the regime across Iran to control the masses,” at the local level and without involvement from the clunky Iranian bureaucracy, the report warns.

The Baqiatallah Headquarters has two primary objectives according to UANI’s report: “Islamizing culture to create an Islamic society, and assisting the regime to create Khamenei’s ideal Islamic government.” Electioneering became a central initiative in order to push this agenda.

“We will try to use the capacity of the Middle Rings [to interfere in elections] all over the country,” the report quoted Abdullah Moradi, director general of the Political Affairs Office of the Ministry of Interior, as saying last year.

During elections, the Baqiatallah Headquarters deploys its local Middle Ring networks to “manipulate political campaigns” and “help vet prospective candidates,” primarily through means of intimidation. Middle Ring groups also play a central role in engineering local elections, according to the report, essentially having a veto role for any candidate who does not meet their draconian Islamic standards.

Middle Ring groups, the UANI experts explain, also ensure that local Iranians vote in line with Khamenei’s wishes through a process of “intimidation and co-optation of voters; coordinated mobilization of networks; in person ballot manipulation, and voter rigging.”

The expected corruption of local groups, tasked by the Baqiatallah Headquarters, could be crucial in deciding Iran’s next president.

Iran held a snap presidential election on Friday after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian died unexpectedly in a helicopter crash in northwestern Iran last month. While the supreme leader is the country’s top decision-maker and has final say on important matters of state, it is likely that the next president will be closely involved in the eventual process of choosing a successor to Khamenei, who is 85.

Khamenei has ensured candidates sharing his hardline views dominate the presidential contest. Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, a 12-member vetting body of clerics and jurists aligned to Khamenei, formally approves candidates for Iranian elections and only allowed six to run out of dozens who applied.

Two of the candidates dropped out of the race just one day before the election after a poor showing in the latest poll, leaving four candidates.

Despite a strong public push by Khamenei encouraging Iranians to vote as a sign of support for the regime, voter turnout was reportedly low this year. According to Iranian opposition and dissident groups, many polling stations remained largely empty throughout Friday.

UANI is not the only voice to argue that Iran’s elections are corrupt. Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said in a message from Tehran’s Ervin prison that Friday’s vote would be a “sham” election.

The results of Iran’s presidential election were not finalized by press time.

The post As Iran Votes for President, New Report Exposes How Regime ‘Rigs’ Elections Through Shadowy Group first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

As camps across Canada prepare to for another summer, the leadership at Jewish operations know they can’t treat this year like any other. Most years, the young campers are escaping the stress caused by disagreements with parents or boring schoolwork. But this year, coming up on nine months of ongoing conflict in Israel and rising […]

The post Jewish summer camp directors in Canada get ready to wrestle with hard conversations about the war in Israel and antisemitism at home appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

For a telltale indicator of New York Times bias, keep an eye on the adjectives and adverbs.

Two recent front-page Times articles offer examples of this particular problem skewing the coverage.

A Times article purporting to show how Israelis “feel little sympathy” for Gazans suffering includes the line, “Michael Zigdon, who operates a small food shack in Netivot’s rundown market and had employed two men from Gaza until the attack, expressed little sympathy for Gazans, who have endured a ferocious Israeli military onslaught for the past eight months.”

The “ferocious” adjective gets hurled by the Times a second time in the same article, which goes on, in case any reader failed to absorb the point the first time, to say that “the death toll in Gaza has spiraled to at least 37,000 since Israel began its ferocious offensive.”

The Israeli self-defense operation gets described by the Times as “ferocious,” while the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 earns no such label. My Webster’s Second defines ferocious as “having or exhibiting ferocity, cruelty, savagery, etc; violently cruel.” Ferocity is defined as coming from the Latin root ferus, meaning wild, “as the ferocity of barbarians.”

That qualifies as slander of Israel, opinion masquerading as New York Times news writing. If the Times news writers and editors want to accuse Israel of waging barbaric, savage, wild, violently cruel warfare against Gazans, they are welcome to make a factual case for that. I think they’d have a hard time of it, given all the evidence about the care that Israel has used to limit noncombatant casualties. But making the accusation in a backhanded, backdoor way by sprinkling tendentious adjectives into news articles is a kind of deception so subtle that a lot of Times readers might not even notice it.

Usually the Times gets faulted for false moral equivalence between the Hamas terrorists and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) defending the Jewish state. In this case, there’s no equivalence; there’s just a straight-out smear of the Israelis as “ferocious” with no parallel negative description of the Gazan attackers.

In the same article, Israel’s government gets labeled as “hawkish” and “right-wing,” while no such descriptions are applied to Hamas or the remaining government of Gaza.

The Times is similarly ferocious in its description of a pro-Israel philanthropist and political donor, Dr. Miriam Adelson. A front-page article about her declares: “She is, in some ways, a political carbon copy of her husband: intensely pro-Israel, rabidly partisan, and a believer in the nobility of using her money, north of $30 billion, and her media empire to buy influence and shape the world.”

“Rabidly partisan?” It’s not enough for the rabid partisans at the Times to call Adelson partisan; they need to escalate it to “rabidly” partisan? The Times published a profile of a pro-Biden Democratic political donor, Jeffrey Katzenberg, without calling him rabid.

Rabid, ferocious — the Times can’t seem to write about Israeli-Americans or Israel without insulting them. It comes after another recent Times article that called Israel’s military response “aggressive” while applying no such descriptor to the Hamas Oct. 7 attack or to the many subsequent rocket launches and missile and drone attacks against Israel by Iran and its proxies.

Some rabid Times editor might want to consider an aggressive crackdown on the adjectives and adverbs or risk the Times further eroding what little remains of its reputation for journalistic impartiality.

The American Jewish community is already increasingly losing patience with the paper. The CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York, a longtime partner of the New York Times in its Neediest Cases Fund, Eric Goldstein, wrote a letter to the editor of the paper faulting the Adelson profile and a Times online headline that said US Rep. Jamaal Bowman had been “Overtaken by Flood of Pro-Israel Money.”

“Not only does it feed a dreadful antisemitic stereotype, it does a disservice to voters in [New York’s] 16th Congressional District who made their voices heard, loud and clear. Equally troubling was the Times‘ recent A1 profile of pro-Israel advocate Miriam Adelson, which played upon those same stereotypes,” Goldstein’s letter said. It faulted the Times for “bias.”

Likewise, the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Abraham Foxman, called the Bowman headline “crude, biased, and disgusting.” In another social media post, Foxman wrote, “NYTimes you are so obsessed with criticizing Israel that it distorts your news judgment.”

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

 

The post Jewish Leader Slams New York Times for ‘Dreadful’ Bias as Paper Faults ‘Ferocious’ Israel, ‘Rabidly Partisan’ Adelson first appeared on Algemeiner.com.