Members of the senior staff of The Israel Project were profiled in an article published Monday in BuzzFeed about advocacy groups currently in Lausanne, Switzerland as that city hosts negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The Israel Project publishes The Tower.

Josh Block, the CEO and President of TIP, and Omri Ceren, TIP’s Managing Director for Press and Strategy, were in Lausanne to provide factual information to journalists covering the talks.

Ceren told BuzzFeed that he and Block were in Lausanne because “what you need are people that have relationships with journalists that trust them to give accurate information plus the information that they actually need. That requires having people on the ground who journalists know they can trust, plus the background infrastructure that anticipated what they needed and made sure they can get it.”

The leaders and goals of The Israel Project were compared with those of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a group that advocates for closer ties with Iran.

Block described The Israel Project’s role in an email to BuzzFeed, writing that it is “important to help people see through the fog of spin being put out by the administration on the ground, in particular their talking points on US nuclear concessions to Iran, which are very similar to what one hears from NIAC, and others who support any deal at any price to America.” He added that “he would ‘go to the ends of the earth, even to Lausanne’ to explain his position, ‘even if it means having to smile politely at people I think are up to no good.’”

In addition to building ties with journalists, Block and Ceren have been appealing directly to the public.

Block argued in an op-ed for The Miami Herald last month that history shows that Iran cannot be trusted to keep its commitments without international pressure and observations.

The truth is, Iran is an unabashed terrorist regime that provides financial and operational support to the Assad killing machine, violent radical Islamist groups from Hezbollah and Hamas to al Qaida, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Indeed, the majority of terror attacks over the past 35 years have been linked to Iran, and more Americans were killed last year by Iranian-backed terrorists than by terrorists of the so-called Islamic State. …

While pocketing countless U.S. concessions on virtually every aspect of its program — enrichment, plutonium, ballistic missile delivery systems, past illicit nuclear weapons work, continued expansion of centrifuge research — Iran has played the West for a fool. Tehran has failed to grant unfettered access to inspect nuclear infrastructure and continues to stonewall the IAEA, the very organization that would be charged with monitoring any new nuclear agreement.

Ceren has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, offering this assessment of President Barack Obama’s outreach to Iran:

Now you’ve entered a very, very strange kind of period in the foreign policy discussion, which is a lot of people are beginning to … So we’re talking about scholars across the political spectrum. So everybody from Michael Doran formerly of Brookings now with Hudson, Tony Badran the Lebanese Christian who is a thinker at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies … Lee Smith who is also at Hudson now … these are people who are saying now reconstruct the president’s foreign policy over the last half-decade and what you see is not incoherence, it’s something that the President really began speaking about as a candidate before he was elected, engagement with Iran until the point where the Islamic Republic emerges, and now I’m using the president’s … phrase, as a ‘successful regional power’.

[Photo: The Israel Project / Flickr ]