Pro-Israel Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin censors Iranian news website

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Oct. 26, 2017. Netanyahu thanked Mnuchin “for ‘the Treasury Department’s strong action against the Iranian regime.”

The US Treasury Department, under Secretary Steven Mnuchin, has worked to block an Iranian news website, Fars News. Mnuchin is an Israel partisan and former hedge fund owner.

Mnuchin received the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Award in 2018. The Adelsons are known for their devotion to Israel. Sheldon Adelson has said that he regrets that he served in the US military instead of the Israeli one. In his acceptance speech (video below), Mnuchin reveals that he had been friends with the Adelsons for 20 years. Adelson has publicly suggested using nuclear weapons against Iran.

Reclaim the Net reports:

“Fars News Agency, an Iranian media outlet, says that it’s had its English-language .com domain blocked internationally under US sanctions.

“In a statement posted to its .ir domain, which the news agency appears to be using as an alternative to the blocked .com, Fars News Agency said its international service provider had been ordered to cut off access to the Fars News Agency’s .com domain by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) which has placed the news agency on its SDN (Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons) list.

FarsNews’s .com domain is registered with domain.com.

“The SDN list names individuals, entities, and organizations that US citizens are prohibited from doing business with.

“The blocking of Fars News Agency’s .com domain comes a few weeks after Facebook and Instagram started blocking posts that show support for the deceased Iranian terrorist and general Qassem Soleimani because of US sanctions. PayPal has also been accused of blocking payments related to the word “Iran” in recent weeks.”

Similarly, YouTube recently took down another Iranian news website, Press TV.

Last summer, US authorities detained without charge a Press TV journalist.

Until recently, the office in charge of the sanctions against Iran was headed by an Israeli citizen, Sigal Mandelker. Israel partisans were instrumental in creating the unit. Alison Weir has previously reported:

Israel partisans & Treasury’s “Office of Terrorism”

The Atlantic reports that Stuart Levey was the founding official in the role Mandelker now holds. Mideast analyst Grant Smith writes: “AIPAC and its associated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), were instrumental in lobbying the president for the creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence unit early in 2004. The Israel lobby also vetted Stuart Levey who President Bush approved to lead the new unit.”

Israel partisans continued to abound. Levey was then succeeded by David S. Cohen (Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz recommended Cohen for his first job, with Israel partisan Nathan Lewin). The Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, is also an Israel partisan.

Former CIA officer and current executive director of the Council for the National Interest Philip Giraldi investigated this situation and found that Israel partisans have pervaded the office. He writes:

…A key component in the Israeli penetration of the U. S. government has been President George W. Bush’s 2004 signing off on the creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) within the Department of the Treasury. The group’s website proclaims that it is responsible for “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats,” but it has from its founding been really all about safeguarding Israel’s perceived interests. Grant Smith notes however, how “the secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli settlements and proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons complex.”

The first head of the office was Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who operated secretly within the Treasury itself while also coordinating regularly both with the Israeli government as well as with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, WINEP and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Levey also traveled regularly to Israel on the taxpayer’s dime, as did his three successors in office.

Levey left OTFI in 2011 and was replaced by David Cohen. It was reported then and subsequently that counterterrorism position at OTFI were all filled by individuals who were both Jewish and Zionist. Cohen continued the Levey tradition of resisting any transparency regarding what the office was up to. Smith reports how, on September 12, 2012, he refused to answer reporter questions “about Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, and whether sanctioning Iran, a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, over its internationally-inspected civilian nuclear program was an example of endemic double standards at OTFI.”

Cohen was in turn succeeded in 2015 by Adam Szubin who was then replaced in 2017 by Sigal Pearl Mandelker, a former and possibly current Israeli citizen. All of the heads of OTFI have therefore been Jewish and Zionist. All work closely with the Israeli government, all travel to Israel frequently on “official business” and they all are in close liaison with the Jewish groups most often described as part of the Israel Lobby. And the result has been that many of the victims of OTFI have been generally enemies of Israel, as defined by Israel and America’s Jewish lobbyists. OTFI’s Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN), which includes sanctions and enforcement options , features many Middle Eastern Muslim and Christian names and companies but nothing in any way comparable relating to Israel and Israelis, many of whom are well known to law enforcement otherwise as weapons traffickers and money launderers . And once placed on the SDN there is no transparent way to be removed, even if the entry was clearly in error.

Here in the United States, action by OTFI has meant that Islamic charities have been shut down and individuals exercising their right to free speech through criticism of the Jewish state have been imprisoned. If the Israel Anti-Boycott Act succeeds in making its way through congress the OTFI model will presumably become the law of the land when it comes to curtailing free speech whenever Israel is involved…

Mandelker frequently speaks movingly of her parents’ suffering under the Nazis. She seems to equate Iran with Hitler, despite the fact that Germany was defeated almost three-quarters of a century ago, and that today it is her birth country that is based on discrimination against people who are not of the preferred religion or ethnicity.

The economic policies Mandelker and others have engineered against Iran are creating significant humanitarian hardship, which seems to be the plan – just as Israel partisans worked to destabilize and eventually attack Iraq. Today, we are teetering on the brink of escalation that could again cost untold lives and damage the U.S. even more.