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Iraq Wants Iran-Backed Factions to Lay Down Weapons, Foreign Minister Says
Iraq’s Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein attends a meeting on Syria, following the recent ousting of president Bashar al-Assad, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed
Iraq is trying to convince powerful armed factions in the country that have fought US forces and fired rockets and drones at Israel to lay down their weapons or join official security forces, Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said.
The push comes with a backdrop of seismic shifts in the Middle East that have seen Iran‘s armed allies in Gaza and Lebanon heavily degraded and Syria’s government overthrown by rebels.
The incoming US Trump administration promises to pile more pressure on Tehran, which has long backed a number of political parties and an array of armed factions in Iraq.
Some Baghdad officials are concerned the status quo there may be upended next, but Hussein played this down in an interview with Reuters during an official visit to London.
“We don’t think that Iraq is the next,” Hussein said.
The government was in talks to rein in the groups while continuing to walk the tightrope between its ties to both Washington and Tehran, he said.
“Two or three years ago it was impossible to discuss this topic in our society,” he said.
But now, having armed groups functioning outside the state was not acceptable.
“Many political leaders, many political parties started to raise a discussion, and I hope that we can convince the leaders of these groups to lay down their arms, and then to be part of the armed forces under the responsibility of the government,” Hussein said.
Iraq‘s balancing act has been tested by Iran–backed Iraqi armed groups’ attacks on Israel and on US troops in the country they say are in solidarity with Palestinians during the Israel-Hamas war.
A promised Gaza ceasefire has the government breathing a sight of relief, though uncertainty prevails over how the country may fare after Donald Trump becomes US president.
During the last Trump presidency, relations grew tense as he ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020, leading to an Iranian ballistic missile attack on an Iraqi base housing US forces.
“We hope that we can continue this good relationship with Washington,” Hussein said. “It is too early now to talk about which policy President Trump is going to follow for Iraq or Iran.”
With Iraq trying to chart a diplomatic third-way, Hussein said Baghdad was ready to help diffuse tensions between Washington and Tehran if asked and noted previous mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran that paved the way for their normalization of relations in 2023.
SYRIA
Armed revolution in neighboring Syria has been viewed with concern.
The Islamist rebels now in power in Damascus were among the Sunni Muslim militants that entered Shia-majority Iraq from Syria after the 2003 US-led invasion, fueling years of sectarian war.
Islamic State crossed the same way a decade later and undertook bloody massacres before being beaten back by a US-led international military coalition and Iraqi security forces and Iran-aligned factions.
Iraq will only be reassured about Syria when it sees an inclusive political process, Hussein said, adding Baghdad would supply the country with grain and oil once it could be assured it would go to all Syrians.
Baghdad was in talks with Syria’s foreign minister over a visit to Iraq, he said.
“We are worried about the ISIS, so we are in contact with the Syrian side to talk about these things, but at the end to have a stable Syria means to have the representative of all components in the political process.”
Baghdad and Washington last year agreed to end the US-led coalition’s work by September 2026 and transition to bilateral military ties, but Hussein said that the developments in Syria would have to be watched.
“In the first place, we are thinking about security of Iraq and stability in Iraq. If there will be a threat to our country, of course it will be a different story,” he said.
“But until this moment we don’t see a threat.”
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Trump Appoints Mel Gibson, With Antisemitic Past, Pro-Israel Actor Jon Voight as Hollywood Ambassadors
Cast member Mel Gibson attends a special screening of the film Monster Summer in Los Angeles, California, US, Sept. 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
US President-elect Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he has appointed three actors — including an Academy Award winner who has a history of making antisemitic and racist comments — to be special ambassadors to the Hollywood entertainment industry.
“It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”
Gibson, 69, endorsed Trump in a video released before the presidential election in November and Stallone, 78, introduced Trump for his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago. Voight, 86, encouraged the public to vote for Trump in a video he posted on social media in October and has called Trump “the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”
Gibson, who recently lost his home in the Los Angeles wildfires, said in a statement that he received the news “at the same time as all of you and was just as surprised.”
“Nevertheless, I heed the call,” said the director and “Braveheart” star. “My duty as a citizen is to give and help and insight I can. Any chance the position comes with an Ambassador’s residence?”
Gibson is the director of the 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” which Jewish groups said promoted antisemitic tropes about Jews being responsible for Jesus’s death. Gibson recently said he will release a sequel to the movie and filming will begin next year.
In 2006, the “Lethal Weapon” star when on an anti-Jewish rant while being arrested for speeding and driving under the influence. He told the arresting officer “f—king Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” The actor later apologized for his comments.
In 2020, Jewish actress Winona Ryder claimed that Gibson once called her an “oven dodger” — a reference to the crematoria at Nazi concentration camps during World War II — and asked her friend who was gay, “Oh wait, am I gonna get AIDS?” Gibson denied Ryder’s accusations. He has been accused of antisemitism other times as well and was caught on tape making racist and misogynistic remarks to his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, was an antisemitic Holocaust denier.
On the flip side, Voight is an avid supporter of Israel and the Jewish community, and said he feels a “responsibility” to combat antisemitism. His father used to work at a Jewish country club in Scarsdale, New York. Voight, who was raised Catholic, said the kindness that Jewish members of the club showed his father and how they embraced him, even though he was not Jewish, helped develop Voight’s love of the Jewish community.
The “National Treasure” and “Ray Donovan” star condemned Hamas-led terrorists for perpetrating the deadly attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Last year, the Academy Award-winning actor criticized his daughter, actress and filmmaker Angelina Jolie, claiming she is “ignorant” and uniformed about Israel, and “influenced by antisemitic people,” after she criticized Israel’s military actions targeting terrorists in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war. He has also said that he is “very disappointed” in Jolie’s anti-Israel stance. He previously bashed the United Nations as well, saying that although it claims to care about human rights, when it comes to the actions of Israel, “it’s just anti-Israel bashing.”
While detailing his close connection to the Jewish culture during an interview in November 2023, Voight expressed his support for the Chabad movement and said “the great Einsteins of the Jewish people across the years were rabbis.”
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ADL Denounces ‘Partisan’ Anti-Israel Resolution Passed by American Historical Association
Illustrative: Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
A controversial resolution that the American Historical Association (AHA) recently passed to accuse Israel of “scholasticide” stands to marginalize its Jewish members and promotes falsehoods about the Jewish state, the Anti-Defamation League argued in an open letter that was issued on Thursday.
The missive comes amid a flutter of debate set off by the resolution, passed earlier this month, which spuriously charged that Israel waged “an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education” system during its war with Hamas in Gaza. The resolution cited damages sustained by education institutions and loss of life, but rather than describing those misfortunes as inevitable consequences of a protracted war that the Hamas terrorist group started by launching a surprise massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, it argued that Israel’s aim was to murder educators and erase Palestinian history and culture.
In Thursday’s letter, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) rejected the AHA’s claims as injurious to the Jewish community — its “framing perpetuates harmful biases and reinforces narratives that marginalize Jewish voices,” it said — as well as to AHA’s mission to be a scholarly organization that does not, as a rule, promote partisan politics. Choosing to do so now by weighing in on an issue which divides not only the academic community but also the broader world, it said, will only reduce AHA to being just another manufacturer of ideological conformity.
“The AHA has been a respected source for evidence-based, nonpartisan historical perspectives for more than a century. Associating with such a resolution risks diminishing the trust of policymakers, journalists, and the public,” the ADL said. “‘Scholasticide’ refers to the intentional mass destruction of an educational system. There is no evidence of this intent by Israel in Gaza or elsewhere. The destruction of institutions, including educational ones, is an unfortunate byproduct of war, exacerbated when terror groups like Hamas embed their operations within school buildings.”
It continued, “As academia faces increased scrutiny, this resolution provides ammunition to critics who accuse scholarly organizations of partisanship. The AHA has been exemplary in defending academic freedom and resisting political incursions into curricular decisions. Endorsing this resolution would undermine these efforts, as well as other initiatives that directly align with the AHA’s mission.”
The letter concluded with the ADL’s urging the AHA Council, a governing body within the organization, to veto the resolution to ensure it “remains a welcoming, inclusive, and intellectually rigorous space for all historians.”
Other organizations and scholars have called on the American Historical Association, founded in 1884 by Herbert Baxter Adams and which today counts 43,000 people as members, to disengage its leadership from their assault on Israel or seek productive ways of contributing to the public debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Let us put aside the impropriety of a professional organization interposing itself officially into a political matter best left to the individual judgement of America’s citizens,” said the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a higher education nonprofit which promotes academic freedom and the restoration of rigorous liberal arts programs. “Hamas is responsible for the consequences of its aggression against Israel, and the ‘Scholasticide’ resolution is the more disgraceful for its unwillingness to state forthrightly Hamas’s culpability for the indeed lamentable destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”
Writing for Compact Magazine, Harvard University history professor James Hankins, argued that the resolution contains exaggerations and omits from its consideration the putative presence of Hamas collaborators within Gazan higher education — at, for example, the Islamic University of Gaza — as well as the use of universities for “military purposes.” A better resolution, he continued, would have urged Palestinian universities to “build trust” with Israel by denouncing Hamas.
“That sort of resolution American academics might legitimately support,” Hanks wrote, adding that there is “insufficient evidence” to support AHA’s claims.
The AHA is not the first professional association for academics to endorse partisan attacks on Israel.
In August, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a statement which endorsed academic boycotts, a seismic decision which overturned decades of policy and cleared the way for scholar-activists to escalate their efforts to purge the university of Zionism and educational partnerships with Israel.
The previous year, members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) overwhelmingly voted to approve a resolution calling for a full academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. With the resolution’s approval, the AAA, established in 1902 and based in Arlington, Virginia, became the first major academic professional association to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) did in 2022.
This latest incident involving the American Historical Association could undermine its internal cohesion, the ADL said in Thursday’s letter.
“There are loud voices advocating for this resolution, but we know there are also many members who are deeply troubled and alienated by it, including those who feel afraid to speak out against it,” the organization concluded. “Failing to veto this resolution would further marginalize these voices and push many historians into silence and out of the association.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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New York Times State Department Reporter Emerges as Foe of Israel
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The New York Times reporter who covers the US State Department, Edward Wong, has had a rocky past few weeks, inflicting a series of half-truths and outright falsehoods on Times readers.
Wong’s technique sometimes is to write a sentence that is technically accurate but leaves out so much significant context that it winds up being functionally inaccurate, or at least highly misleading.
Consider, for example, this sentence in a recent Times article about American military aid to Israel: “The annual aid had been about $3 billion, but Mr. [President Joe] Biden increased that amount after Israel began waging war in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks by Hamas.”
Actually, it wasn’t only “Mr. Biden” who increased the aid, but also Congress, which under the US Constitution has the power to appropriate funds. There have been several votes on this since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, and they’ve been overwhelming. For example, an April 20, 2024 House vote on the “Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act” was 366 in favor and 58 opposed. An April 2024 vote in the Senate was 79 to 18. Even before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the aid levels had been at $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and an additional $500 million a year in cooperative missile defense funding.
Wong uses the same half-truth technique in a different sentence in the same article: “At one point, Mr. Biden said he was withholding a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to try to dissuade it from destroying Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, but the Israeli military reduced most of Rafah to rubble anyway.”
This conveniently omits that the Israeli military didn’t merely reduce “most of Rafah to rubble,” but that also the Rafah governorate is where Israel killed the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, and also where Israel rescued two hostages, Fernando Marman and Louis Har. It further omits that the humanitarian catastrophe that the Biden administration warned would ensue after a Rafah invasion by Israel — “I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” Vice President Kamala Harris said — failed to materialize.
Wong writes that “some Democrats in Congress and their aides are certain to be furious at the administration for trying to push through the $8 billion package of weapons sales to Israel.” Under the Constitution, the “aides” don’t have a say in the matter; the members of Congress do. The $8 billion is part of a $15 billion package that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Any Democrats or Republicans who wanted to block the weapons had their opportunity, and they lost the vote.
What is driving Wong’s selective reporting?
Wong made his own views clear in a “news analysis” published in the Times. That article claimed, without evidence, that, “Mr. Biden’s unwavering public support of an Israel led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as it wages a deadly war against Hamas in Gaza has been especially costly in terms of American and global public opinion.” That’s not “news analysis”; it’s a false claim.
The same piece claimed, without evidence, that “no foreign policy issue has been more divisive for Mr. Biden than his support for Israel throughout its war in Gaza.” Actually, aid to Ukraine has been more divisive; the Ukraine aid passed the House only by a 311-112 margin, still overwhelming, but narrower than the Israel aid vote.
During the US presidential campaign, Donald Trump criticized Biden for not being supportive enough of Israel, saying in one debate that Biden had become “like a Palestinian.” If Wong thinks Biden’s problem with American public opinion is that Biden’s been too pro-Israel, it’s evidence of the far-left Times readership and social circles of Times journalists, not any indication of the underlying reality.
The headline and subheadline of the Wong news analysis claim, “Biden and Aides Courted Allies Who Undermined US Goals/The Biden administration has been caught by surprise when partners like South Korea and Israel have acted against US.interests and principles.”
What “US interests and principles” has Israel acted against?
The article claims, “America’s alliances and partnerships under Mr. Biden’s stewardship have been complicated. Key partners have acted counter to the values that Mr. Biden has espoused, notably democracy, rule of law, and human rights. In some cases, those countries have undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world.” Yet not a single example is provided of how Israel has “undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world.”
Nor is the counterfactual example considered of how it would have undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world if the US had chosen instead to abandon Israel to defeat by Iranian-backed terrorists hoping to wipe Israel off the map. Is that the policy that Wong would have preferred, a Hamas takeover of Israel along the lines of the Taliban takeover of Kabul? Would that have been a big boost to American prestige? How would an alternative policy of allowing Israel to be conquered by Iran-backed terrorists have been consistent with American values of democracy and human rights?
The talking head that Wong musters to support his article’s point of view is Matt Duss, an extreme aide to extreme socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders recently ran afoul of the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, who posted, “The idea that @BernieSanders voluntarily would sit for an interview with Hasan Piker, an individual who routinely has used his platform to spread anti-Jewish tropes, amplify propaganda from a designated terrorist group, and promote toxic anti-Zionism, says an awful lot about the senior senator from Vermont and the normalization of antisemitism.”
Instead of holding Sanders to account for his extremism, the New York Times and Wong choose to amplify his point of view and basically endorse it as reasonable. It’s blame-Israel-and-its-USsupporters-for-everything-that-goes-wrong.
And Wong has a track record. He was out on social media claiming falsely that “the Israeli military has killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza in the last year,” omitting that many of the so-called journalists were actually terrorist operatives, according to Israel. I previously described a June 2023 article by Wong as “so egregiously slanted against Israel that it reads as if it were dictated by the Iranian information ministry.” Perhaps it’s time for the Times editors to reassign Wong to a different beat, or counsel him that if he’s determined to pursue an anti-Israel advocacy agenda, he might find himself better suited applying for a position elsewhere.
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.
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