Meir Javedanfar

Meir Javedanfar was born in Iran and lives now in Israel, and has made a career of posturing as a "Iran analyst" despite his flimsy academic credentials, and association with propagandists seeking to stoke up a war against Iran.

Richard Silverstein summarizes Javedanfar uses as a propagandist:
 * There is also an effort, often by pro-Israel interests, to parachute these individuals into the Beltway political mix. One of those who's succeeded admirably at self-promotion and maximizing his meager credentials into a career as a B-list analyst of Iranian politics is Meir Javedanfar. According to the meager biographical details he’s offered, he was born in Iran and left in with his family 1987. There is a relatively large Iranian community in Israel so he may have emigrated to Israel though his bio doesn’t make this clear. His academic career took him to a second-rank UK institution, Lancaster University, where he earned an MA in the International Relations and Strategic Studies program. A bio published at a speaker’s bureau says he has another MA in information management, but doesn’t name the school. Javedanfar doesn’t mention this degree in any of his other online biographies. He has not published in peer-reviewed academic journals. He has no permanent academic position (he teaches one course on Iranian politics at the Inter-Disciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel’s private college). He is listed as co-author of one book, written with former Haaretz security reporter, Yossi Melman. The latter left his job shortly after WikiLeaks revealed that he’d been a previously unknown source (and possibly paid source) of Stratfor. Like all of Melman’s other work, The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran is full of conspiratorial theories that paint Iran in the worst possible light and pose the nuclear threat in the most dire terms. In Gareth Porter’s review, he wrote:
 * The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran takes on the highly charged issue of Iran’s nuclear program — a tricky project even under the best of circumstances, given the interests of all the relevant parties to the dispute in promoting their own version of reality. A critical challenge in carrying out such a study is to avoid becoming captive of an official propaganda line, and co-authors Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar have failed to surmount that challenge…. [It] tilts sharply toward the official Israeli view on virtually every question surrounding the Iranian nuclear program…. The thesis of the book is clearly stated in the first four chapters: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous Islamic extremist whose determination to exterminate Israel and belief in the coming of the Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi) adds up to a desire for war against Israel, with nuclear weapons if possible.
 * Porter charitably posits that “his [Melman's] analysis has dominated in the conversation between the two coauthors.” But even if you consider that Melman wrote all this conspiratorial nonsense and Javedanfar served as little more than translator of the Farsi-language documents used in the preparation of the book, this still means the Iranian allowed himself to be sucked into a project involving extremist fear-mongering. I’m certain he did so willingly because associating himself with a figure like Melman would lend himself further credibility. Credibility is the currency of opportunists like Javedanfar. ... Sanati’s critique proves that Javedanfar is excellent at promoting the established wisdom of the anti-Iran policy community. But he appears to have no internal sources within Iran to inform of political and economic developments there. For that, he must rely on third-hand accounts in western media, which may be unreliable at best. ... Returning to Javedanfar’s CV, though he did write the Iran chapter for the PSI Handbook of Global Security and Intelligence, it was co-edited by Prof. Shlomo Shpiro. The latter specializes in national security issues at the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University, which is known as Israel’s Orthodox institution of higher learning, with a generally right-wing political and academic orientation. His bio says he worked as Israel correspondent for BBC Persian, was a member of the Club of Rome “TT30″ (Think Tank 30),” where he ran its Beyond Oil economic forecast group, and was an analyst for Jane’s Intelligence Digest. The only evidence of a Beyond Oil entity associated with TT30 is a blog whose last post was in 2005. Jane’s Intelligence Digest no longer exists and hasn’t been printed for a number of years. A query to the corporation that published it has not confirmed what he did for Jane’s and how long he worked there. Javedanfar falsely implies an affiliation with Columbia University’s School of International Affairs by virtue of his membership in the Gulf 2000 Project, an e-mail listserv maintained by Gary Sick, who is on the faculty:


 * A member of Gulf 2000 Project, which is run by the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University in New York City and staffed by internationally renowned experts in Persian Gulf states.


 * Membership in the listserv confers no special distinction and Javedanfar typically exaggerates his bona fides. I too was once a member, but left precisely because some poseurs like Javedanfar, some with no academic qualifications in the field, espoused especially robust pro-Israel views which were never rebutted by other members. There is an academic program associated with Gulf 2000 which hosts conferences and papers, but I’ve found no evidence that Javedanfar participated in any of its official University activities. Javedanfar has a blog, Iran-Israel Observer, which catalogs his anti-regime views. He also publishes prolifically online at a variety of sites most of which have a distinct right-wing orientation. In that sense, he’s a bit like Daniel Pipes, who earned a PhD at a prestigious academic institution, but has eschewed academia for agitprop and pamphleteering. But unlike Pipes, Javedanfar can be taken into respectable company. He wears a suit at the dinner table and espouses views that are acceptable because they are not bellicose or outrageous. At the pro-Israel, neocon-funded Pajamas Media (PJM) he published scores of articles between 2007-09. In his rebuttal to this article, Javedanfar claims he left PJM because his “opinions were not in line with theirs.” In truth, PJM essentially ran out of venture funding in 2009 and dumped many of its former contributors. Since Javedanfar has never previously disclosed his disgruntlement with PJM or reason for leaving, this claim must be viewed with a certain degree of skepticism. He is also a contributor to RealClearWorld, a conservative news aggregator akin to Huffington Post. He blogs at Times of Israel, a newish right-wing English language news site. The financing for the venture comes from a right-wing U.S. Jewish hedge fund manager. The blog editor avoids any responsibility for the accuracy or editorial content of posts published by pointing to the policy that offers little or no editorial oversight of the product at all. This of course is a boon to people like Javedanfar. ... The $64,000 question is why someone with such lackluster credentials would find the doors of power open to him. There is only one answer: he is Israeli-Iranian. He’s a twofer, representing the two different poles of this conflict. As such, he’s viewed as having a particular authenticity as a spokesperson for both sides. In reality, Javedanfar does not represent an authentically Iranian voice unless you consider monarchists and the MEK to be such. Leaders of the Iranian-American community with whom I’ve consulted have scoffed at the notion that he represents them. They consider him, at best, an opportunist, and not a very convincing one at that. Anyone who associates with this man or hires him should know that besides being an intellectual poseur and fabricator, he’s little more than a cipher. He may be sincere and speak for himself. He may be on someone’s payroll. Either way, he represents nothing of substance or integrity. He’s an empty suit. What especially annoys some who truly represent an Iranian-American constituency, is that there are a limited number of seats at the table inside the Beltway at policymaking venues. Those seats are filled with the usual suspects: administration officials, think-tank scholars, politically connected academics. But few of them are truly independent voices that represent an alternative to the consensus discourse. When someone like Javedanfar is offered one of those seats there’s one less for legitimate figures. That serves to limit the diversity of debate over issues of moment like sanctions, military assault, nuclear proliferation, etc. If Israel can succeed at doing this then its own extremist views will be an easier sell.

Publications

 * Yossi Melman, Meir Javedanfar, The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran, Caroll and Graf Publishers, 2007.