TEL AVIV — A George Soros-financed organization that was previously identified by the Obama White House as central in helping to market the Iran nuclear deal to the news media has warned Donald Trump that he will “own the consequences” of bolting the international nuclear accord.
The Ploughshares Fund, with which former secretary of state John Kerry has been closely associated, sent out the following tweet on Monday warning Trump about “consequences” “if and when he violates the international agreement.”
The Fund, however, did not mention that Iran is already accused of violating the agreement by signing the deal under false pretenses. During an address last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a cache of secret files he says were obtained from inside a hidden Iranian site and clearly demonstrate that Tehran maintained a secret nuclear weapons program despite declarations to the contrary.
Netanyahu explained that the structure of the U.S.-led international nuclear agreement was in part based on deceptive Iranian descriptions of its previous nuclear work. He said Iran’s failure to disclose its secret program while misleading the world shows the nuclear deal is “based on lies based on Iranian deception.”
The Israeli leader presented evidence that Iran continued research for a nuclear weapons program even after signing the 2015 nuclear deal.
On Monday, Iran confirmed reports that Kerry met in New York with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to discuss ways of saving the Iran nuclear deal.
Kerry last June keynoted a Ploughshares confab in San Francisco where he staunchly defended the Iran deal. At the event, Kerry also implied that then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster was the best bet at keeping the nuclear agreement alive, according to a Ploughshares Fund description of the June 5, 2017 event.
McMaster was replaced with former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton in March.
From September 2006 to February 2017, McMaster is listed as a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), where he served as consulting senior fellow. The IISS describes itself as a “world-leading authority on global security, political risk and military conflict.” Breitbart News reported Ploughshares is a donor to IISS, with IISS listed as a grantee for Iran issues in Ploughshares Fund’s budget report for 2016.
Soros-Funded Ploughshares Part of ‘Echo Chamber’ to Sell Obama’s Iran Deal
Ploughshares Fund is financed by Soros’ Open Society Institute.
The involvement of Ploughshares in selling the Iran agreement to the public was revealed in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile of Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” The article contains interviews with Rhodes and scores of top Obama administration officials.
Robert Malley, then a senior director at the National Security Council, expounded on the genesis and execution of the marketing plan to sell the Iran deal.
Malley explained to the Times that “experts” were utilized to create an “echo chamber” that disseminated administration claims about Iran to “hundreds of often-clueless reporters” in the news media.
Times author David Samuels wrote:
In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Rhodes told Samuels that the marketing strategy took advantage of the “absence of rational discourse” and utilized outside groups, including Ploughshares.
When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal.
“We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
Ploughshares says it has awarded hundreds of grants “whose aggregate value exceeded $60 million.”
Ploughshares in turn funds a who’s-who of the radical left, including the pro-Palestinian J Street; the radical, anti-Trump Indivisible Project; the far-left Institute for Policy Studies, which calls for massive slashes in the U.S. defense budget; and the International Crisis Group, a small organization that boasts George Soros and his son, Alexander on its board.
The group says its mission is to support the “smartest minds and most effective organizations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, prevent new nuclear states, and increase global security.”
Besides funding from Soros’s Open Society Institute, Ploughshares is also financed by the Buffett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Another Ploughshares donor is the Tides Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of the radical left. Tides is funded by Soros.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.