Hundreds rally in San Diego to stop Iran N- deal

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – Numerous speakers during a Sunday, July 26, rally at Balboa Park passionately decried the nuclear arms deal that the United States and other major world powers recently reached with Iran, but the San Diegan who easily was the hero of the day chose the printed word-not the microphone-to make his views known against the deal.

He was Congressman Juan Vargas (D-California) whose Op-Ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune announcing his plan to vote against the deal was reprinted, circulated among the protesters, and quoted from time to time during the rally organized by StandWithUs.

In his Op-Ed printed on Saturday, July 25, Vargas wrote: “Do we accept an agreement that fails to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapons, or do we stand up and say no.  I intend to stand up and vote against this deal. This is not a partisan issue.  This is an issue of our national security, and the security of our allies, and I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing this deal and press for a better deal that will truly end Iran’s nuclear weapons program and make the world safer.”

While Republicans in the Congress have been nearly unanimous in opposing the deal urged by the Obama administration, they do not have the two-thirds majority necessary to kill the deal, assuming any
Congressional action to withdraw U.S. cooperation with Iran is vetoed by President Obama.  Thus Democrats like Vargas have become the swing votes who can break or make the Iran deal, and this fact was emphasized by such speakers as Dan Schwimmer, an AIPAC activist, and by their signs bearing the phone numbers of Congress member’s offices.

Rally attendees – estimated at 600 by StandWithUS organizers and between 400 and 500 by San Diego police who monitored the demonstration – were repeatedly urged by emcee John Davidi to thank Vargas for taking a stand and to  urge three Democrats, reportedly still undecided –Senator Barbara Boxer, Congresswoman Susan Davis, and Congressman Scott Peters—to urge them to vote against the deal.  They were also asked to call Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has announced her support for the deal, in an effort to change her mind.

While StandWithUs is best known for its pro-Israel activism, its leaders distributed large American flags and discouraged the display of Israeli flags at the rally to emphasize for news cameras that the issues of economic sanctions being removed against Iran and of that nation eventually becoming a nuclear power, are not just the concern of the Jewish state, but also of the United States, as well as its allies all over the world.  Jonathan Valverde, of the Latinos for Israel organization, sang “The Star Spangled Banner” but, unlike many Jewish sponsored events, there was no singing of “HaTikvah.”

While most attendees complied with the StandWithUs strategy, a small group of anti-Obama protesters seeking his impeachment infiltrated the rally to display signs calling him a traitor and a terrorist, and occasionally interrupting rally speakers to demand “free speech”  for their point of view. StandWithUs officials disavowed these protesters, saying that they had crashed the rally and were in no way connected with the Jewish and Christian groups who had coalesced to oppose the nuclear deal.

Some of the themes and speakers in the more than 90 minute long rally included:

–Sunday was Tisha B’Av, a day on which Jews the world over mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples as well as the 1492 Expulsion of the Jews from Spain.  Rabbi Arnold Kopikis, who trained in Argentina before accepting pulpits in Mexico and San Diego, said that the Iranian government was behind other tragedies, including the bombing of the Jewish community (AMIA) building and the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.  He said the proposed nuclear arms deal will enable the Iranians to spread more terror and more tragedies to be mourned on Tisha B’Av.

Pastor Jim Garlow of the Skyline Church in Rancho San Diego was perhaps the most charismatic speaker, cheering the crowd with comments that Bible-believing Christians have a  duty to stand by Israel.  He spoke of an unnamed Christian pastor who declined to attend the rally on the grounds that churches shouldn’t get involved in political issues.  Garlow went on to say just such an attitude led congregations prior to World War II to fail to rally to the defense of Jews against Hitler.  This must never occur again, said Garlow, who was followed to the podium by Gracie Walker, a college-aged member of his church, as well as his wife, Rosemary Schindler, who regularly leads delegations of Christians on visits to Israel.

Mitch Danzig, a member of the Jewish community who regularly supports Israel on various radio shows, drew parallels between the Iran deal and the 1938 Munich Agreement in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin succumbed to Hitler’s demand to annex German-speaking portions of Czechoslovakia believing that by appeasing Hitler’s demand for territory he had assured “peace in our time.”  Danzig said the P5+1 nations that negotiated the deal with Iran knew more about Iran’s true intentions to take over the Middle East and to spread terror around the world than Chamberlin had known about Hitler.

Philip Graham, the step-son of former California Gov. Pete Wilson and a Republican Assembly candidate in his own right, said voters in 2016 should be very careful to elect a President who will revoke rather than continue the administration’s understanding with Iran, should Congress fail to do so.

The organizer of the rally was Sara Schoonmaker, regional director of StandWithUs, a 14-year-old non-profit Israel education organization.  She noted that on the Sunday, July 26 date of the rally, the Congress had only 48 days left to oppose the deal, or it would otherwise go into effect.  She said that meant there were only 48 days, less than seven weeks, “until Congress decides the fate of the nations.  Does that sound overly dramatic to you?  Well, it’s not. The decision before Congress determines whether we will have a place to carry out our days, a place for our children to live and thrive.  Congress right now has the decision to fast-track Iran into nuclear weapon capability or to stop Iran’s nuclear progression.  It’s either stop or go. There is no in between, there is no making nice with a radical regime that has sworn us off as an enemy, even after we signed the agreement 12 days ago.  Even now, they chant ‘Death to America’ and parade in the streets, burning our flags.  Every sensor that you have should be going off because we are not dealing with a logical ideology.  We are dealing with a radical regime that is intent on destroying us.”

Caroline Glick, a writer and deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, was the featured speaker at the rally that had already lasted well over an hour by the time she was introduced.   She nevertheless was able to rivet the audience’s attention.

She said the Obama administration has falsely presented the Iran deal as a choice—“if you support this deal, then you oppose war; if you oppose this deal, then you support war.  Anybody who stands in opposition to this deal is a warmonger.”

However, she said, “the only chance we have of averting a cataclysmic deal is to kill this deal.  This deal assures war. … There is a direct link between giving a $150 billion signing bonus {in assets that would be unfrozen} to the Iranian regime, the world’s chief supporter of terrorism around the world, and enabling Iran by all accounts, including that of the President himself, to become a nuclear power, guaranteed, at the end of this deal if they don’t cheat.”

“What is the direct link between these two things?” she continued.  “Today without this deal Hezbollah in Lebanon has 100,000 missiles pointed at Israel.  Hamas is rebuilding its missile arsenal that was used as well as destroyed last year in its war of aggression against Israel and the Israeli people.  These two are just two of the terrorists organizations that serve as Iran’s proxies in its war against the Jewish people and its war against civilization itself.

“These terrorist organizations—as well as the Houthis in Yemen, the Assad regime in Syria, Iran’s proxies throughout the world and Iran’s Shi’ite militia in Iran, are all going to be massively empowered by this deal.  Iran’s deputy foreign minister said it, just yesterday, he said ‘we accepted no limitation on our purchase or disbursal of conventional weaponry despite what the United States says; there is no deal that says there will be any sort of limitations that will be imposed upon us for the next five years.  This is a lie’  the Iranians said.  ‘We will continue to supply our allies.’”

‘Allies’ in Iranian parlance, said Glick, is another word for ‘terrorist organizations’ that are Iran’s surrogates.  “So at the same time they are empowering these already massively powerful terrorist organizations and regimes that they control, they are also going to be moving forward to develop nuclear weapons.  Now how are the states in the region going to be responding to this?  There are two options.  Either you preempt – you preemptively attack Iran’s terrorist clients or you absorb a war and then you have to fight an immensely more powerful enemy than you had today before this agreement goes into force.

“Either way it requires war!”

Meanwhile, The Chabad Lubavitcher organization set up a mural of the Western Wall on a stretch of lawn to the side of the rally, urging attendees not to panic, but to put on tefillin and to pray for peace.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World and Masori is an SDJW photographer.  You may comment to donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com