Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Free-Speech Fraud Bari Weiss Would Rather Deport Than Debate

As anti-war politics gain ground, Weiss’s Free Press is pushing to remove Trita Parsi from the US.

Bari Weiss on Wednesday, September 13, 2023, in Los Angeles.

Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press and ideological commissar at CBS News, is the purest example imaginable of a free-speech hypocrite. She is quick to resort to the typical language of liberalism in calling for an open marketplace of ideas, touting The Free Press as a forum for robust debate. But she has actually spent her entire career suppressing opposing points of view, especially on the issue closest to her heart, Zionism. 

As an undergraduate at Columbia, Weiss became notorious for trying to get Palestinian professors fired, a precursor to her more recent firing of a half-dozen senior producers and correspondents at 60 Minutes in an effort to make CBS’s flagship news program more Trump-friendly. As Nation columnist David Klion noted last September in The Guardian, “Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and ‘woke’ progressives, even as she decried ‘cancel culture’ and claimed to champion free speech.”

On June 11, The Free Press published a disgraceful hit piece that offered another stunning example of Weiss’s two-faced approach to free speech. Written by Jay Solomon and purporting to be a work of reportage, the piece was in fact a barely disguised polemic arguing for the deportation of Trita Parsi, cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

One problem with the article is its author. Solomon is a disgraced former Wall Street Journal reporter who was fired in 2017 because he had been intertwined in business deals with a frequent source of his, Farhad Azima. Azima was euphemistically described by The New York Times as having a “colorful career.” In blunt fact, he was an arms dealer with CIA connections who was a bit-player in the Iran/Contra scandal. This history makes Solomon not only dubious in general but especially untrustworthy when he relies on unnamed Iranian-American sources, as he does in his piece for The Free Press.

The article leans heavily on typical McCarthyite techniques of guilt by association, with an intense focus on the activities of Parsi’s brother Rouzbeh Parsi, whom Solomon vaguely accuses of having contacts with Iranian state interests while working at the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI). These charges themselves stink of a witch hunt since they are an attempt to stigmatize any discussions with the Iranian government. This is a familiar tactic used against anyone who pushes for a more peaceful foreign policy. Furthermore, even Solomon acknowledges that he doesn’t have the goods, writing that an investigation by Rouzbeh Pari’s former employer “concluded that Rouzbeh Parsi wasn’t paid by Iran or under its control.”

If the smearing of Rouzbeh Parsi is fishy, the attempt to tarnish Trita Parsi is even more transparently absurd. Solomon writes:

I didn’t see Trita Parsi’s name anywhere in the Foreign Ministry emails as an IEI member. But Iranians in the diaspora who track the regime’s influence networks told me that it seemed inconceivable that he wasn’t aware of his brother’s leadership role in the organization.

I didn’t see Trita Parsi’s name anywhere in the Foreign Ministry emails as an IEI member. But Iranians in the diaspora who track the regime’s influence networks told me that it seemed inconceivable that he wasn’t aware of his brother’s leadership role in the organization.

The fact that unnamed sources in the diaspora (perhaps........

© The Nation