|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 28 July 2015, the web site of Allen B. West, a former one-term congressman and conservative pundit, published an article asserting that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had hidden a close familial connection to an Iranian official with whom he had negotiated a nuclear deal. According to that article (You will NOT BELIEVE who was best man at John Kerry's daughter’s wedding), John Kerry concealed the information that his son-in-law was Iranian during the U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for his position as secretary of state. Moreover, throughout the negotiations over a deal limiting Iran's development of nuclear weapons, Kerry hid the fact that he was buddy-buddy with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister whom he negotiated the nuclear deal — so much so that the best man at the wedding of Kerry's daughter was Zarif's son: All of this information was wrong. Vanessa Bradford Kerry, John Kerry's daughter from his previous marriage to writer Julia Stimson Thorne (from whom he was divorced in 1988), married Brian Vala Nahed on 10 October 2009. Brian Nahed is not Iranian: he is an American-born U.S. citizen who attended school at UCLA and Yale and is currently a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (where his wife is also a physician specializing in critical care). This information has been plainly available for years in his official workplace biography on the Massachusetts General Hospital web site: Brian Nahed is not Iranian: he was not born in Iran, he has never held Iranian citizenship, he has never worked or lived in Iran, and he has never even been to Iran. He's a natural-born U.S. citizen from New York who has lived, attended school, and worked in the United States his whole life. More important, he is not close friends with either Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif or Zarif's son: he doesn't know either of them, and Zarif's son was not the best man at his wedding (nor, as some accounts report, was Zarif's son his college roommate). Vanessa Kerry herself verified to us that Zarif's son was not at her wedding: The small piece of information here that is true is that Brian Nahed's parents were themselves born in Iran. However, they permanently left that country to immigrate to the U.S. forty years ago, well before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and now live in Los Angeles (where Brian's father also works as a physician). As for the rest of the facts presented in the Westian article, they were nothing more than a collection of supposition and innuendo, such as the claim that John Kerry only revealed his daughter's marriage to an Iranian-American once he had taken over as Secretary of State in 2013. By the article's own admission, that marriage had been very publicly covered in wedding announcement published by the New York Times in 2009, one which used the full Persianized versions of Brian's parents' names — something hardly suggestive of the notion that the media were conspiring to cover up revelation of their ancestry: More absurdly, the article's statement that even the official [New York Times] wedding announcement carefully avoids any reference to Dr. Nahed (Nahid)'s birthplace (which is uncommon in wedding announcements) and starts his biography from his college years was deliberately misleading and specious, as that wedding announcement also made no mention of the bride's birthplace and started her biography from her college years (which is in fact quite common in wedding announcements, especially those of people who have achieved significant accomplishments in adulthood). And it makes no logical sense whatsoever that anyone attempting to hide Brian Nahed's familial connection to Iran would carefully avoid any reference to his foreign birthplace of New York. Finally, the unsourced statement that Secretary Kerry and Zarif first met over a decade ago at a dinner party hosted by George Soros at his Manhattan penthouse. What a surprise. is (even if true) little more than out-of-context innuendo intended to suggest some kind of close pre-negotiation friendship between the two figures without providing any actual evidence of it. Both men have an extensive history of political and diplomatic service to their countries over the last thirty years: Mohammad Javad Zarif lived in and was educated (up to the PhD level) in the United States, served as a member of the Iranian delegation to the United Nations (a position in which he met with a number of Washington politicians), has been a headline speaker at foreign policy conferences in the U.S. (attended by prominent Washington politicians), and has been Iran's minister of foreign affairs since 2013, while John Kerry served several terms in the U.S. Senate, was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, chaired the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, and has been U.S. Secretary of State since 2013. It's hardly a surprise to anyone the least bit familiar with the political world that two men who have long held high positions in their countries' national governments and been closely involved with foreign affairs might have crossed paths at some point prior to their first negotiation as their countries' official representatives.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}