Sanctions and Illicit Finance

Odeh, a former member of the US- and EU-classified terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was responsible for a 1969 bombing that murdered two students, Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe, in a Jerusalem supermarket. She pleaded guilty in 2017 to US naturalization fraud, and was deported in September to Jordan because she had lied about her terrorism conviction when she entered the US. Israel bans the US-based Jewish Voice from entering the country.

The University of Cologne students are the latest college students to follow student groups in rejecting BDS as an antisemitic campaign. The University of Vienna in Austria, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Leipzig University and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz all have rejected BDS since 2016.

Amirsedghi,who has written about the Iranian regime’s human rights violation, said she is appealing to German and EU politicians to “stop trying to save the mullahs because as long as they are kept alive, Iran continues to be murdered. There is also the time after the mullahs and we Iranians will never forget that.”

Toby Dershowitz is Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor on Iran specializing in Iran’s economy and financial markets, sanctions and illicit finance. FDD is a non-partisan think tank focusing on national security issues. Follow them on @tobydersh and @SGhasseminejad

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a long way to go before it’s ready to launch a national cryptocurrency. Tehran’s central bank has that ambition, but the effort remains at the experimental stage. Some recent media reports claim that Iran has “launched” a state cryptocurrency based on gold called the Peyman. What really is happening, however, is less dramatic. It has few immediate implications for Iranian sanctions evasion, but does signal Iran’s strategic intent to use blockchain technology to develop long-term sanctions resistance.