The White House tweeted to the anti-Israel website Mondoweiss on Tuesday, via the Obama administration’s official Twitter account supporting the Iran deal, @TheIranDeal. Mondoweiss has also been widely accused of antisemitism–even by far-left critics of Israel.
The tweet came in response to a Mondoweiss tweet about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the 24-day inspections delay in the deal would allow Iran to hide nuclear material. Netanyahu made the claim on a webcast to the American Jewish community.
MJ Rosenberg, a former Media Matters foreign policy blogger (who left when he himself was accused of antisemitism) wrote in March 2014 on the website of the far-left Tikkun magazine:
Lately I have been struck by the raw anti-semitism evinced on anti-Israel websites (most egregious example, Mondoweiss)….The only difference between this anti-semitism and the old-fashioned kind is that it has no impact. If you don’t visit Mondoweiss or other websites like it, you won’t know it exists. It threatens no one. It is just ugly. But ugly and irrelevant.
Legal scholar David Bernstein wrote at a Washington Post blog in May that Mondoweiss is an anti-Jewish “hate site”:
Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go….There is only one audience for this sort of tripe, and it is people who dislike Jews.
As of 3 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, the White House tweet to the Mondoweiss site remains live on Twitter.
Unlike earlier inspections regimes, such as the nuclear inspections in the New START treaty with Russia, U.S. inspectors are barred from access to Iran under the deal. Confidential side agreements between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran are also said to allow Iran to take its own environmental samples at military sites suspected of housing nuclear activity, rendering the tests effectively useless.
The 24-day delay has also been criticized for allowing Iran to hide non-nuclear violations, and nuclear material at small sites.