August 06, 2021
During the Obama Administration, right-wingers in the Republican Party took out after a young Iranian-American woman in the State Department, arguing that she was untrustworthy because of her Iranian birth. Now, other right-wingers in the GOP are going after another Iranian-American woman that President Biden has named to the State Department staff.
She is Ariane Tabatabai, who joined the Bureau of Arms Control and International Security February 17.
One of the reasons she is seen as untrustworthy, according to her critics, is that her father lives in Iran and holds high rank in the Islamic Republic.
They also say that she has defended the Islamic Republic in her academic work prior to her State Department appointment.
The attacks on her began, not surprisingly, on the internet. But they were then picked up in Congress, where a group of lawmakers led by Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey demanded an investigation into Tabatabai and the revocation of the security clearance that she must have to hold her current post.
“There is reason to believe that Ariane and her family have ties and allegiance to the Iranian Regime and pose a security threat to the United States, which is of great concern because she currently holds a security clearance in your administration,” Van Drew wrote in a letter to the Biden Administration.
Van Drew is a 68-year-old dentist first elected to the House in 2018 as a Democrat. He then switched parties and won re-election in 2020 as a Republican.
Van Drew’s letter focuses on her academic writings and speeches, which have expressed skepticism about the limits of US power in dealing with the Iranian regime. It also attacks Tabatabai for her family background her father was a prominent university professor in Iran who has been photographed with government officials at official events. Her father has since retired and moved to the United States.
The dual loyalty smear against Tabatabai echoes the campaign against Sahar Now-rouzzadeh, another State Department official of Iranian heritage who was demoted by the Trump Administration after baseless right-wing media attacks against her, which an internal investigation later found was an improper demotion. Nowrouzzadeh quit the State Department while Trump was in office and moved to academia.
The Biden Administration has defended Tabatabai. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a February 2021 Twitter post, “We strongly condemn online harassment of [State Department] personnel. While we welcome debates on key policy issues, ad hominem attacks on US officials – or anyone – based on ethnic background are unacceptable. We call for civil discourse, diplomacy, and constructive dialogue.”
Tabatabai, an academic with a long CV in Middle Eastern security studies, is fairly moderate in her positions. While skeptical of the possibility of US-led regime change, she has also argued that the United States should be in no rush to return to diplomacy with Iran.
Her father, Javad Tabatabai, is a former professor at the University of Tehran. He has promoted a strain of secular nationalism called Iranshahri as an alternative to the “dead” project of “‘political’ and ‘ideological’ Islam.”
He was dismissed from his post as deputy dean of the law school for criticizing the Iranian government in the 1990s. But he received the Farabi Award from the Iranian Ministry of Science in 2018. Photos of him at the award ceremony which President Rohani and other high officials attended would soon provide ammunition for opponents of the Biden Administration.
One Iranian monarchist said Tabatabai was “among the apologists of the Islamic Republic in America who has consistently advocated for compromise with the Islamic Republic and strongly criticized the actions of the previous [Trump] administration.”
Another said Tabatabai’s father “is well-known for his corporation [sic] with #mullah’s regime over decades and is a key figure and a supporter of their ideology.” The post included a photo from the Farabi Award ceremony, as well as another photo of Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho-meini’s grandson shaking hands with University of Tehran faculty members.
Then, an account called Hafezeh Tarikhi posted a clip of Tabatabai pushing back on pro-regime-change talking points in academic speeches. The account advertises itself as an archive for the “controversial positions” of Iranian public figures, and, according to the US website Responsible Statecraft “often posts out-of-context clips of Iranian-Americans who support diplomacy.”
Finally, Van Drew along with fellow Republican Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Yvette Herrell of New Mexico asked the Biden Administration to revoke Tabatabai’s security clearance and investigate her ties. Responsible Statecraft said their letter cites the exact same links as an article in the right-wing Washington Free Beacon, suggesting the representatives had not done any research on their own.
The Biden Administration did not seem to give much weight to these accusations. “The response was basically, to paraphrase, you’re imagining it, there’s nothing here, everything has been done, there’s been good background checks, and this is just political rhetoric,” Van Drew said.
But, the congressman said, he wasn’t going to let the issue go: “We’re gonna keep an eye on it. We’re gonna ring the bell because if you don’t ring the bell and let people know what’s going on, they’re going to assume everything is okay.”
He did not explain why he thought the FBI background investigators had approved her security clearance. Background investigators do look into ethnicity but do not consider it to be a disqualifying characteristic. Many Russian ethnics, for example, got clearances during the cold war as many were the offspring of anti-communists who had fled the Soviet Union.
The attacks on Nowrouz-zadeh grew in impact largely because some officials of the Trump Administration gave them credence. But that is not the case with Ariane Tabatabai and the Biden Administration. That means the attacks are unlikely to have any resonance but it also means that GOP right-wingers can be expected to keep repeating their allegations in an effort to weaken the Biden Administration by portraying officials as disloyal.