Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — As the U.S. continues to grapple with the threat of the Islamic State group, Republicans in Congress have argued that Iran should be a higher priority than the militant organization. Now, lawmakers have embraced an unlikely partner to argue that case: the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, an exiled Iranian opposition group that was until 2012 considered a foreign terrorist organization by the United States.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee this week became the latest power broker to conflate the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State, sometimes known as ISIS, with the nuclear diplomacy efforts between the U.S., its international partners and Iran. A counterterrorism subcommittee invited Maryam Rajavi, who leads the MEK with her husband Massoud, to argue via teleconference that the theocratic Iranian government is to blame for the Islamic State’s rise.

“If it were not for the Iranian regime’s domination of Iraq, the sectarian policies of its puppet Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the massacre committed against the Sunni population in Iraq, and if it were not for the slaughter of 250,000 people in Syria by the Assad regime and the Iranian regime’s Quds force, ISIS would have never been able to find such a fertile breeding ground for its emergence and expansion,” Rajavi said in her official testimony Wednesday.

Rajavi’s recommendation for how best to defeat the Islamic State was music to the ears of Iran skeptics: regime change in Tehran.

Supporters of the nuclear negotiations with Iran suspect that hawks both in Congress and abroad feel the same way as Rajavi. Comments earlier this year from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), of the Senate Committees on Intelligence and Armed Services, have reinforced that impression.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s invitation to Rajavi raised eyebrows among Middle East watchers, and even prompted two other expert witnesses invited by the committee to back away from the panel that featured her. “The committee handled this abysmally,” said Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria until 2014 and a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, in an interview with Al-Monitor this week. “What the fuck do the MEK know about the Islamic State?”

Ford ultimately agreed to testify before the committee in a panel separate from Rajavi. “I think this is a discussion that our people in uniform deserve,” he told HuffPost after his remarks.

Maryam Rajavi gestures as she arrives to attend the annual meeting of the MEK’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, near Paris, on June 27, 2014. (Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

Rajavi’s depiction of how Shiite-led Iran bolstered Sunni extremism by backing sectarian Shiite allies in Iraq and Syria matches some of the conventional wisdom around the Islamic State. Yet skeptics argue that it doesn’t quite make sense for the House committee to have invited Rajavi to testify, given that her focus is on Iran and that the MEK has had little direct experience with the Islamic State’s onslaught. To these skeptics, the move seems politically calculated.

Thousands of people in Iraq and Syria have actually experienced the group’s brutality firsthand, critics of Rajavi’s appearance note, and those victims have not been invited to testify. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights announced on Tuesday that the Islamic State has killed more than 2,000 Syrians off the battlefield since it declared its caliphate last June, using methods like beheading and stoning. The group has been especially fierce in targeting dissenters among its main constituencies, foreign fighters and Sunni Arabs unhappy with the Iraqi and Syrian governments.

A spokeswoman for subcommittee chairman Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) told Foreign Policy this week that Rajavi is qualified to comment on the Islamic State because she is a Muslim woman who knows the “prejudices inherent in radical Islamist ideology,” and because of her group’s association with Iraq, where it was sheltered by then-President Saddam Hussein after being expelled from Iran in the 1970s.

The Obama administration, which revoked the MEK’s terrorist designation in 2012 after the group renounced violence and cooperated with the United States’ plans for its members in Iraq, did not publicly condemn the invitation to Rajavi. But a State Department official speaking on background echoed the question of whether the House Foreign Affairs Committee truly wanted to hear about the Islamic State, or whether the committee members were simply looking to promote an anti-Iran voice.

“We believe that there are other relevant witnesses who could speak more credibly to the threat posed by ISIL,” the official said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State group.

Iran is itself fighting the Islamic State, which believes that Shiites, including the ayatollahs who rule in Tehran, are infidels. The U.S. is tacitly cooperating with Iran and its controversial proxies to combat the Islamic State in Shiite-run Iraq.

In her remarks Wednesday, Rajavi urged lawmakers to reject what she called an “artificial dichotomy” between Iran’s government and the Islamic State. According to the MEK leader, Iran’s support of Iraqi Shiite militias and its tolerance of Islamic State beheadings show that both Iran and the militants seek to spread Islamic extremism.

Members of the Iraqi paramilitary Popular Mobilization units, which are dominated by Iran-backed Shiite militias, celebrate after regaining control of the village of Albu Ajil from the Islamic State group on March 9, 2015. (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

Lawmakers defended the decision to invite Rajavi despite the controversy, and even the irony, of a counterterrorism panel hosting a woman recognized by the U.S. as a former terrorist.

“Whatever the MEK did or is accused of, it was against a terrorist regime,” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), referring to the Iranian government. “Trying to defeat the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran can be branded as terrorism under some circumstances, but most of the time it’s thought of as policy.”

Sherman pointed to what MEK advocates consider the group’s greatest triumph: its revelation to Congress in 2002 that Iran was running an undeclared uranium enrichment facility in the city of Natanz.

“The MEK has actually been a useful source of information to Congress, unlike an awful lot of the witnesses we have,” Sherman told HuffPost.

That moment has since been eclipsed, however, by revelations that the U.S. intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy were privy to the site before the MEK’s public disclosure, and by a series of other MEK claims that ultimately did not hold up to scrutiny. The most recent MEK allegation, presented in Washington by the group’s political arm in early March before a deadline for the nuclear diplomacy with Iran, was debunked once Foreign Policy revealed that the site the MEK identified as a secret Iranian nuclear facility was in fact a production center for identification cards.

Though now welcome guests in the U.S. Capitol, the MEK once led chants of “death to America” and celebrated the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. Maryam Rajavi’s husband, Massoud, was then the head of the organization and an ardent critic of Iran’s U.S.-backed king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Rajavi viewed himself as the rightful leader of Iran, and throughout the 1970s, the MEK effected a bombing campaign against the shah’s government, assassinating at least six Americans in the process.

When the shah fell, it was the Islamist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, not Rajavi, who assumed power. Khomeini’s government cracked down on its potential rival, conducting mass executions of MEK members. Rajavi’s group responded with a steady stream of terror attacks against the nascent government, ultimately killing dozens of Iranian parliamentarians as well as the country’s president and prime minister.

The MEK eventually moved to a compound in Iraq called Camp Ashraf, seeing Hussein as a friend because he, like the MEK, opposed the ayatollahs. The MEK’s legacy in Iraq is a key reason why the U.S. is careful about directly condemning the group today. The U.S. has treated MEK members in Iraq as “non-combatants” and “protected persons,” out of concern that Shiite Iran-influenced fighters might target them. In 2012, the Obama administration, alongside the United Nations, the European Union and the Iraqi government, agreed to resettle a number of MEK members at a former U.S. base called Camp Liberty. And since September 2013, senior State Department adviser Jonathan Winer has been responsible for a humanitarian effort to resettle “Iranian persons found to be in need of international protection out of Iraq.”

With Iranian influence in Iraq now at new heights, though, the MEK is at greater risk than ever before — and the need for members to travel outside Iraq for their own safety is especially real, which makes it difficult for the U.S. to continue to speak of them as terrorists or liars.

The risks faced by MEK members based in Iraq have formed the core of the group’s powerful, yearslong lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill, according to investigations by The Huffington Post and The Intercept. The campaign has won the dissidents access to lawmakers from around the country, and is thought to have played a key role in the MEK’s removal from the terror list. Poe, the chair of the panel that heard Rajavi speak on Wednesday, has received more than $17,000 from MEK supporters since 2009, according to an analysis by LobeLog’s Eli Clifton.

From left to right: Former Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Callista Gingrich, former Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) attend the annual meeting of the MEK’s political wing in Villepinte, France, on June 22, 2013. (Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images

Asked Wednesday if he was concerned about Rajavi’s extreme views — specifically, her overt desire for regime change in Iran — Sherman responded: “OK, let’s establish a policy in Congress that we don’t have any witnesses with axes to grind and point of view or political agendas. If we establish that policy, I get to sleep till noon every morning. Because there are no witnesses at any hearing that aren’t trying to influence public policy for their own purposes.”

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I was in my office a few weeks ago, when my boss knocked at the door.

“Mike!” I said, guiltily. I propped the door open with a sneakered foot, an embarrassing self-help paperback in my hand. Behind me: a yoga mat, partially unfurled.

“Tell me something,” Mike said. He didn’t seem to notice the mat. “You ever hear the saying: don’t go looking for a zebra in a barnyard?”

“What?” I said.

“Think about it.”

Then I watched as he turned around, and walked down the hall.

“Wait!” I called out. “A zebra?” As if that was the point. “What does that mean, Mike?”

But Mike didn’t stop walking. He held his hand up in a jaunty partial-wave, his back turned to me.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said.

When I interviewed with Mike, nearly two years ago, for a teaching job, he asked me a lot of questions, but not many about my qualifications. We talked instead about life, and what was supposed to be an hour at a coffee shop turned into two, and then three, until Mike pulled out his cellphone, and squinted at the time on the screen.

“Shit,” he said. “Get out of here, kid. It’s done.”

He had barely looked at my résumé.

Mike was Yoda… if Yoda was a 75-year-old Jewish man from Brooklyn. This was the strangest interview I’d ever had. And I’d had my fair share of interviews.

There was, for instance, the interview where I’d done my best Village People-dance, for a chance to wait tables at Joe’s Crab Shack. There were tutoring jobs, front-desk jobs, babysitting jobs, and jobs that required me to search for pot in dorm rooms. I had interned with an investment banker once (hated it). Managed a restaurant (meh). Worked at a start-up (it tanked). I earned a couple of random degrees along the way until, after several years of bobbing around, I found myself at that coffee shop with Mike.

The night before the interview, I wondered what I might say, if Mike questioned my bobbing. Could I weave a coherent narrative about my experiences? Did it make sense that I had taken an LSAT prep course while simultaneously filling out applications to dental school? Could I, in good faith, explain the years of income earned as a bartender, given the fact that I grew up in a ferociously orthodox Muslim place? How could I reconcile my degrees in genetics with what I wanted to do now: teach college students about youth and popular cultures?

None of it made any sense. In fact, my life made no sense. It had no grand plan to it, no structure, no driving purpose. It was messy and arbitrary and often contradicted itself. I was a drifter. A bobber. A jack of some trades, master of zero.

I couldn’t sleep that night.

There comes a time in a woman’s life, and it’s happening to me right now, when she starts to take stock. She looks around, and says: “Alright, what do we have here? Where am I headed, and what for?” In some cases, she has arrived where she thinks she’s meant to be. In others, she is map-less and disheveled, frantically knocking on barnyard doors, searching for signs of wildlife.

Sunday night, I went to a BBQ at my best friend’s house. I asked her what she thought about the zebra.

“What’s your guess?” she said.

I shrugged. “Google doesn’t give me anything. I’ve asked a dozen people at this point.”

“No clue?”

“None.”

So she took the question to the group. One guy suggested it was a kōan, a Buddhist puzzle. Another told me I should be looking for zebras where zebras live. Not in a barnyard.

“Yes, but what IS the zebra?” I said.

“Why do you care?” said one man. “Why do you need to figure it out?”

I looked at him, surprised. The group quickly moved on to something else. But for the rest of the BBQ, I kept thinking about what he had said.

Was he right? Maybe the more interesting question here was: why did this thing matter to me? Why was I beating myself up so much, trying to find an answer?

I don’t know what prompted Mike to knock on my door that afternoon, but that’s probably beside the point. Maybe answers in general, at least the ones that truly matter, can’t be found by thinking a lot, or by sprinting urgently from one job, one relationship, one barnyard to the next. Maybe the key is to just sit with the questions themselves; to forgive the wrong turns and stumbles; to let go of needing to know what the purpose is, what the end should look like, what ought to be next. Maybe it’s only then that, ironically, magically, the zebra has any chance of being found at all.

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WASHINGTON — The House has voted multiple times to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows young undocumented immigrants called Dreamers to stay in the U.S. and work.

So the House Armed Services Committee’s approval late Wednesday of two amendments that would help DACA recipients who want to join the military was a rare and potentially controversial event.

The amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act — one from Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), the other from Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) — are fairly small in scope. Neither would actually change the law to allow more Dreamers to join the military.

But the fact that they were approved at all was a step forward, said Gallego, who served as a Marine. His amendment says the Secretary of Defense should consider allowing Dreamers with DACA status to join the military, but would not require him to do so.

Dreamers “are another opportunity for us to recruit some of the best and the brightest and the most motivated to serve our country, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t take advantage of that,” Gallego said in an interview.

His amendment passed 33 to 30.

The committee voted 34 to 29 to approve Veasey’s amendment, which would ask the Defense Department to evaluate how DACA and other deferred action programs would affect military recruiting efforts.

DACA, which was created in 2012, allows some undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain here with work authorization for two years, with the opportunity to renew their permits. It has thus far been granted to more than 600,000 people. An expansion of the program planned for this year by President Barack Obama has been held up in the courts, but the 2012 version of DACA is still operating.

In general, undocumented immigrants are barred from joining the military. That ban cracked slightly last year, when the military made some DACA recipients eligible to enlist under the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest policy, previously only for legal immigrants. But most Dreamers would not be eligible for the program, which puts a high premium on those who speak less-common foreign languages, and not Spanish. Most Dreamers, but not all, are Latino.

Legislation to allow Dreamers to join the military hasn’t made it far in the House. Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) reintroduced his ENLIST Act last week to allow Dreamers who joined the military to work toward legal status. His bill has never received a vote on the House floor.

The fact that the Gallego and Veasey amendments were approved may cause drama as the National Defense Authorization Act moves forward. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) issued a statement on Thursday accusing the committee of accepting “an amnesty amendment” that “would provide a fast track to citizenship for those accepted into a program Congress has voted to defund three times.”

“This will bring about a major fight among those of us who have given our oath to support and defend the Constitution and mean it and those who simply gave their oath,” King said. “This is a dark day both for those that defend the Rule of Law and those that seek to keep the United States safe.”

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As a member of the fractional minority of humans who has ever been excited about diagramming sentences or parts of speech — a smaller percentage, I would wager, than transgender people — I have been excited to explain repeatedly over the last few days what a pronoun is.

Usually, I have to corner non-trans people to get them to talk about pronouns. It’s decidedly not considered the sexy part about trans experience. When I’m ready to talk about genital surgeries (and even when I have said quite clearly that I’m not interested in discussing them) people hang on my every graphic word. As I talk, they ask increasingly detailed questions and pry into my sex life in remarkably unsubtle ways, attempting to determine whether I personally own or have direct experience of, these after-market parts of the body in real life.

When I want to talk parts of speech, it’s like I’ve offered to show my collection of bus transfers. “It’s those words that stand in for proper names or nouns — like he, she, it and they,” I explain, with the fervor of a proslytizer in my eyes, while people edge away from me and fake important phone calls. “We say, ‘Zev went to the store and he bought milk,’ or ‘Ignacio bought milk the last time they were at the store,’ or ‘Hanne is allergic to dairy products, so she never buys milk.’ In all of those sentences, there’s a pronoun: a word that refers to the main subject so that you don’t have to keep saying their name.”

Then I say: “We never say ‘it’ for people unless they specifically request that — it’s dehumanizing and very not cool. If you don’t know what pronoun to use for someone, you can always either ask or say ‘they’!” (If we’re online, I refer them to this genius cartoon from Robot Hugs.)

Why am I continuing to give this little speech even when people would clearly rather have root canal than a little grammar talking-to? It’s important. Pronoun use for trans people has been used as a cudgel to bully and wound trans people. If someone really wants to show how very much they “don’t believe in” trans folks (clap your hands, honey) they will take repeated opportunities to use the incorrect pronoun, different from the pronoun someone has already indicated they use.

Conversely, one of the most welcoming (or triumphant!) things in my young life was being referred to by the right words; called the right name. It’s even a new-ish fashion in progressive circles to give your pronouns when you introduce yourself, or write them in your nametag. I love how much agency this gives to trans and non-binary people to say it once and enforce thereafter.

(Though I always roll my eyes at the non-trans, binary-identified people who say “you can use any pronoun for me, I don’t care!” I understand that you’re trying to be supportive, but that’s not a good method — it just cheapens the importance of pronouns for people to whom they are crucial. Focus on getting other people’s pronouns right instead, please.)

So part of why I am always riding my pronoun hobbyhorse is that talking about people correctly makes them feel both more well and more welcomed. But the other part is that a person’s ability to use the right pronouns for someone is an instant barometer of whether they have even the tiniest amount of trans knowledge, even the smallest care to give about being respectful and appropriate. A person who knows less than nothing about trans issues can do this thing right upon five seconds instruction, and learn from there.

Which brings us (inexorably, this week) back to Bruce Jenner. Like every major media circus that relates to LGBTQ and especially to trans people, it’s profoundly mixed — yay for some respectful exposure, boo for focusing again on a wealthy white person to the exclusion of some horrifying truths about the experiences of trans people of colour, especially trans women. Yay for continuing to produce more humans who know that trans is a thing at all, boo for perpetuating some profoundly binary myths about how gender works. It’s a mixed grill, and as with all such things we each eat a combination of what we’re familiar with and what tastes good to us, not necessarily what we should be eating.

What Bruce Jenner has not given us, however, is an updated protocol with which to refer to him. I assume he’s saving this big reveal for a high-ratings episode of his own reality show, in which he and his family receive a share of the advertising dollars that such fodder as the new name of The Olympian Almost Formerly Known As Bruce Jenner will surely bring. Let’s be honest: if I could have made money of my transition process, as opposed to just paying and paying and paying, you bet I would have. But it leaves some of us — the more vulnerable of us — in a bit of a pickle.

See, usually after something like the big Bruce Jenner special, I would be learning about everyone around me and how they feel about trans people. If someone was using the correct new pronouns, or even trying to, I would have a sense of — at the bare minimum — whether they believed in my right to exist or not. In Bruce’s case, I’m left with no useful way to take the temperature of my fellow humans. Now for me that’s fine — everyone and their Grandma already knows I’m trans, or they easily could if they knew how to operate the Google.

For people who may be more thinking about disclosing (letting someone know their trans history), or moving toward coming out (beginning to understand themselves as trans), this is very valuable information. In the same way that rape jokes speak volumes to women about who they could trust if they were attacked, derisive refusal to use a stated new pronoun tells trans people (or newbie proto-trans people) who we can trust with information about our bodies and our identities. And for some folks, who are fighting to have their own identities — and the pronouns that go with them — respected, an unchanged Bruce Jenner is unfortunately being used as yet anther excuse for the abovementioned bad behaviors of mispronouning and its evil twin, dead naming (calling a trans person by their former name, especially after they’ve given you their real name).

With violence against trans people peaking right along with the media coverage, knowing who we can trust is more important than ever. Who gives a crap about Bruce Jenner’s pronouns? I do. You should, too.

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WASHINGTON, April 30 (Reuters) – Republicans in U.S. House of Representatives passed the first joint House-Senate budget plan in six years on Thursday, a measure that aids the party’s goal of dismantling President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform law this year.

The Republican-authored plan would eliminate deficits by 2024 through deep cuts to social programs while increasing military spending by nearly $40 billion next year. It passed 226-197 largely on party lines.

The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to pass the budget plan next week. Because it is a non-binding resolution, Obama does not sign it into law. (Reporting By David Lawder; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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