Others have already remarked on former Senator Rick Santorum’s surprising expression of support for Iranian gay rights in last night’s GOP presidential primary debate in Iowa, support which evidently applies only to countries whose regimes he wants to topple. The Cable’s Josh Rogin also has a good rundown of the debate’s foreign policy misstatements.

I want to focus on another part of the exchange between Rep. Ron Paul and Santorum, in which Paul responded to Santorum’s assertion that “Iran is a country that has been at war with us since 1979″ by saying that Santorum “is wrong on his history. We’ve been at war in Iran for a lot longer than ’79.”

PAUL: We started it in 1953 when we sent in a coup, installed the shah, and the reaction — the blowback came in 1979. It’s been going on and on because we just plain don’t mind our own business. That’s our problem.

A bit later, Santorum had a chance to respond:

SANTORUM: Well, anyone that suggests that Iran is not a threat to this country or is not a threat to stability in the Middle East is obviously not seeing the world very clearly. He sees it exactly the way that Barack Obama sees it, that he has to go — we have to go around and apologize for the fact that we’ve gone out and exerted our influence to create freedom around the world.

I don’t apologize for that. I don’t apologize for the Iranian people being free for a long time and now they’re under a mullacracy that tramples the rights of women, tramples the rights of gays, tramples the rights of people all — all throughout their society and it’s the greatest supporter of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world.

While Paul is right to point out that Iranian hostility to the U.S. didn’t simply spring out of nowhere in 1979, his characterization of the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that removed Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh as “war” is pretty strange, and his “because we just plain don’t mind our own business” explanation of America’s foreign policy problems simplistic.

On the other hand, Santorum’s claim that the toppling of Mosadegh and the installation of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi was an example of the U.S. going out “to create freedom around the world” is simply ridiculous, as is his claim that the Iranian people were “free for a long time” under the Shah, a dictator so corrupt and brutal that the Iranian people eventually overthrew him in a revolution. The fact that that revolution was quickly co-opted by forces as brutal as the Shah is a tragedy, but not an argument in his favor.

Santorum’s rosy view of a corrupt, dictatorial regime like the Shah’s is, however, not particularly surprising. Back in February he criticized President Obama for siding with Egyptian protesters and accused him of “throwing [Egyptian president] Mubarak under the bus.” But I suppose Santorum would say that the Egyptian people were “free for a long time” under Mubarak, too.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

The war hawks on the right seem to like GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty. Since he launched his campaign, Pawlenty has fired off all the right rhetorical lines and the neocons are impressed. Jen Rubin at the Washington Post called him “forceful and precise on national security.”

While Pawlenty may be the neocon favorite, he’s had some trouble getting his views in order. In May, the former Minnesota governor got confused when a reporter asked him about what he’d do about the threat from Iran and — after he clarified that the reporter was indeed talking about Iran — began discussing his policy in Iraq, while referring to citizens of that country as “Iranians.”

Last night during the GOP presidential debate, Pawlenty criticized President Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal timeline, saying he would have instead, accepted the advice from Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen — whom Pawlenty referred to as “General Mullen” — “and drawn them down a little slower.” But in an interview this morning with Politico’s Mike Allen, Pawlenty said Obama’s timeline is too slow. “Has the president been too slow with is Afghanistan drawdown?” Allen asked. “Yes,” Pawlenty said. However, he later pivoted back to his talking point from last night:

PAWLENTY: Gen Petraeus and Adm Mullen make a recommendation that said we understand the need to draw down from the surge level of troops and Barack Obama didn’t accept the recommendations. He’s drawn it down faster and quicker I think because of the election next year. It coincides very coincidentally to his needs on the electoral calendar next year.

Watch it:

While Pawlenty was most likely simply confused with Allen’s (fairly clear) question, confusion and incoherence are becoming the hallmark of his foreign policy views thus far in his campaign.

In a major foreign policy address in June, Pawlenty said that the United States should recall its ambassador from Syria as punishment for the government’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy activists. Yet in the same speech, he said “we should press every diplomatic and economic channel to bring the Assad reign of terror to an end.” Apparently using “every” diplomatic channel available to persuade Assad to change course doesn’t include using America’s top diplomat to Syria.

On July 30, the New York Times profiled David Yerushalmi, the man behind the anti-sharia movement, looking into the hysterical claims of the “creeping sharia” crowd, as well as Yerushalmi’s own history of inflammatory and bigoted statements.

Yesterday, Yerushalmi responded in the American Thinker, accusing the writer Andrea Elliott of taking his words “out of context” (his standard claim whenever confronted with his own past writings) and insisting, “I have never written anything that calls for discrimination against…Muslims qua Muslims.”

Really? Here’s Yerushalmi on the very same website in 2006:

Islam was born in violence; it will die that way. Any wish to the contrary is sheer Pollyannaism. The same way the post World War II German youth were taught by their German teachers and political leaders to despise the fascism of their fathers, with strict laws extant still today restricting even speech that casts doubt on the Holocaust, so too must the Muslim youth be taught from the cradle to reject the religion of their forebears.

I’d say that advocating a legal regime that forces Muslims to reject Islam pretty clearly qualifies as “calls for discrimination against…Muslims qua Muslims.”

But if that’s not plain enough for you, Yerushalmi also heads an organization called Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), whose “draft law outlawing sharia” suggests the following measures for dealing with America’s alleged Muslim problem:

- It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.

- The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.

- The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.

- No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.

Maybe Yerushalmi just has his own secret, magical definition of “discrimination.”

Fortunately, it seems that more people are getting wise to Yerushalmi’s scam. Yesterday, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League — which provided a good backgrounder on Yerushalmi — published an op-ed noting that “the threat of the infiltration of Sharia, or Islamic law, into the American court system is one of the more pernicious conspiracy theories to gain traction in our country in recent years”:

[Anti-sharia] measures are, at their core, predicated on prejudice and ignorance. They constitute a form of camouflaged bigotry that enables their proponents to advance an idea that finds fault with the Muslim faith and paints all Muslim Americans as foreigners and anti-American crusaders.

It is true that Sharia is being used elsewhere around the world in dangerous ways. While Sharia law can address many daily public and private concerns, it is nonetheless subject to radical interpretation by individuals or groups who subscribe to a more puritanical form of Islamic jurisprudence. Some individuals try to interpret Sharia law for their own radical agendas. It raises more serious concerns when it comes to implementing Sharia law in its entirety, as can be seen with the examples of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban. But that certainly doesn’t apply to America, where concerns about a “creeping Sharia law” are the stuff of pure paranoia.

Coming soon: Frank Gaffney with a Washington Times op-ed casting Foxman as an unwitting agent of the “stealth jihad.”

Former Clinton and Bush White House top counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke alleges in an interview for a radio documentary commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that then-CIA director George Tenet and other top CIA officials withheld intelligence on two al Qaeda operatives living in the United States that ended up taking part in the attacks. Philip Shenon at the Daily Beast reports:

Clarke speculates — and readily admits he cannot prove — that the CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists, while they were living in Southern California under their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. After the recruitment effort went sour, senior CIA officers continued to withhold the information from the White House for fear they would be accused of “malfeasance and misfeasance,” Clarke suggests.

The CIA says that while it knew about the two al Qaeda hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the agency admits if failed to share information on them, but maintains that Tenet was not informed about them and top CIA officials were not involved in a cover-up. Shenon also notes that the 9/11 Commission investigated rumors that the CIA tried to recruit al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, but its final report found no evidence to support the claims and said “it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA” about the two terrorists.

Clarke made the comments for the documentary in 2009 and says his theory is based on a hunch because he says its “the only conceivable reason that I’ve been able to come up with” to explain why he and others at the White House weren’t told about the two terrorists until the day of the attacks. He says if he’d been told, the 9/11 hijackers would have been captured which thus, might have prevented the attacks.

Tenet and two other former top CIA officials responded to Clarke’s allegations in a statement, saying that “his recently released comments about the run-up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.” The statement continued, “Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate — which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination — that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.”

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Middle East media watchdog closely aligned with U.S. neoconservatives and Israel’s hawkish security establishment and rightist Likud Party. The grant was awarded “to conduct a project that documents anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East.” The announcement continues:

This grant will enable MEMRI to expand its efforts to monitor the media, translate materials into ten languages, analyze trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and glorification, and increase distribution of materials through its website and other outlets.

Finding examples of anti-Semitism is already a robust MEMRI project and one wonders why exactly they needed the cash: According to publicly available tax filings, MEMRI had nearly $5 million in revenue in 2007 and more than $4.5 million in revenue in 2008.

What’s more troubling, MEMRI has faced accusations of mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources to portray regional media and attitudes in an overly-negative fashion. One of the most common issues has been with MEMRI’s mistranslations which appear to show anti-Semitism on thin evidence. In 2007, CNN correspondent Atika Shubert checked MEMRI’s translations of a Palestinian children’s program against those provided by the cable news channel’s own interpreters:

Media watchdog MEMRI translates one caller as saying – quote - ‘We will annihilate the Jews.’ But, according to several Arabic speakers used by CNN, the caller actually says ‘The Jews are killing us.’ MEMRI told us it stood by its translation.

In other instances, MEMRI has been accused of twisting translations to portray criticisms of Israel and its driving ideology, Zionism, as anti-Semitic. In 2006, Rima Barakat, a Palestinian- and Muslim-American activist and one-time Republican candidate for the Colorado state assembly, wrote in the Rocky Mountain News:

Halim Barakat (no relation), a professor at Georgetown University, published an article in Al-Hayat Daily of London titled “The wild beast that Zionism created: Self-destruction.” By the time MEMRI “translated” it, the title was distorted to “Jews have lost their humanity.” Barakat objected, “Every time I wrote Zionism, MEMRI replaced the word by Jew or Judaism. They want to give the impression that I’m not criticizing Israeli policy, but that what I’m saying is anti-Semitic.” It seems obvious that MEMRI is adamant on stigmatizing anyone who criticizes Israel and/or Zionism as being anti Jewish.

In a 2002 article, then-Middle East editor of the British Guardian newspaper Brian Whitaker criticized MEMRI for inaccuracies that reflected an agenda:

As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.

All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.

The organization was founded as a U.S. tax-exempt non-profit in 1998 by now-Hudson Institute Mideast policy chief Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American, and current MEMRI president, Israeli Yigal Carmon, a 20-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (where he spent five years running Israel’s occupation of the West Bank) and top adviser to two Likud governments. An early archived version of the “about page” of MEMRI’s website lists five staff members, three of whom (including Carmon) have backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence. The same page lists one of MEMRI’s missions as “emphasiz(ing) the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel” — though the line has since disappeared from the website.

In addition to providing journalists and the public with translations, the media watchdog has attracted the attention of burgeoning (and closely linked) European and American anti-Muslim movements. MEMRI was cited 16 times in the so-called manifesto of anti-Muslim right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, showing up even more when MEMRITV was included.

MEMRI’s board of directors and board of advisers read as a veritable who’s who of right-wing supporters of Israel — including many neoconservative figues and their close allies — such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Steve Emerson, Norman Podhoretz and Alan Dershowitz. (HT: Jim Lobe and Philip Weiss.)