Middle East Insider · Issue 045 · Thursday, August 13, 2026

The State of the Forum

Good afternoon. Two announcements lead today. First, I sat down this week with Eylon Levy, my close colleague and former debating rival, for a full episode on whether the Mecca pact is an Islamic NATO or a piece of paper; the links are below. Second, I leave on vacation after this issue. The Insider pauses for two weeks, and the MEF Dispatch carries the Forum’s work to your inbox every other day in the meantime. Today’s edition uses the pause for a report I owe you: what the Middle East Forum is, what it produced in the first half of 2026, and where the second half goes. The board still runs: Trump claims “total control” of Hormuz and says America may keep it, Tehran’s new strait authority answers that the strait “remains blocked,” Beirut passes the amnesty law, and Baghdad calls September 30 final.

On the record with Eylon Levy: is the Mecca pact an alliance or a document?

This week I joined Eylon Levy, my close colleague and former debating rival, on his program EylON the Record. Eylon made Israel’s case to the world as a government spokesman after October 7; he now runs one of the sharpest long-form interview programs covering the region. Our subject: the Mecca pact, the mutual defense agreement Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed on August 7, which its boosters call an Islamic NATO. Readers of this brief know the file: the Board carried the signing, Tuesday’s brief carried Tehran’s read of it, and the Forum’s desks published four separate analyses of the pact this week alone.

My position on the program: “This is a piece of parchment that’s not worth more than the paper tiger that it’s written on.” Each signatory joined for its own domestic and foreign-policy reasons, and a defense clause among three states that will not fight one another’s wars is a communiqué, not a command structure. Eylon pressed the counterargument, and it deserves the airing he gave it: Israel has learned the hard way what happens when it dismisses rivals as unserious. The full exchange runs longer than any summary should, and the episode covers the war, the strait, and what an actual answer to Mecca requires. Watch or listen at the links below.

The Mecca pact matters less for what it binds than for what it reveals: Riyadh no longer trusts the American umbrella enough to stand under it alone, and Tehran reads every hedging Arab capital as proof its endurance strategy works. The Forum’s published answer is on the site: treat Mecca as a message, and reply with an architecture that actually fights, trains, and shows up. The same test applies at home. This newsletter pauses for two weeks, and the work it reports on does not. The record below shows why: investigations, legislation, litigation support, and a communications lifeline into Iran continue on their own schedules, vacation or not.

MEF Online, Aug 12, Answer Mecca With an Alliance: the pact will not fight, and Israel should build the bloc that will, a security architecture running from India through the Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean. The companion argument to this week’s interview.

MEF Online, Aug 12, Third Time Is the Charm? The Mecca Pact and the Sad History of Collective Defense: the pact is the third iteration of a single Saudi effort to substitute for the American umbrella, and each iteration involves more parties committing to less.

MEF Observer, Aug 12, How India Views the Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey Mecca Pact: New Delhi’s concern runs through Pakistan’s proliferation record, with a companion Observer piece asking whether Pakistani mediation with Iran serves Beijing’s interests over Washington’s.

The Insider pauses. The Dispatch carries.

I leave on vacation after this issue, and the Insider returns in two weeks, before the September briefings. The Forum’s coverage does not stop. The MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, arrives three times a week, and most readers of this brief already receive it. If you do not, one click fixes that:

The two publications do different jobs: the Insider compresses the war and the Forum’s files into one daily brief; the Dispatch delivers the full articles as the desks publish them. New readers can orient with the Field Guide. Replies to this issue land in my inbox and I read them on return.

What the Forum is, and what the first half produced.

Some of you subscribed to this brief in the last six months and know the Forum mainly as the institution behind it. The pause is a good moment to state the record. Daniel Pipes founded the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia in 1994. The mission has not moved in three decades: promote American interests in the Middle East and defend the West against Islamism. The method has. For its first decade the Forum operated as a think tank. After September 11 it kept the research and began acting on it directly: in the press, on Capitol Hill, inside federal agencies, and in court. The working rule is simple to state and hard to execute: find the people and networks doing the most damage, document them in evidence-grade detail, and move the findings into Congress, agencies, courtrooms, and the press until something changes. A finding that stays in a research file counts for nothing. The deliverable is the outcome.

The first half of 2026 produced four outcomes of record. One: the Department of Health and Human Services opened a debarment investigation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in June, after the Forum briefed HHS officials and Congress on CAIR’s grant record; Secretary Kennedy announced the review publicly, and 14 House members led by Rep. Chip Roy had demanded it in an April letter (the announcement). The Forum’s July audit put the stakes on paper: $79,045,396 in HHS grants to 14 Islamist or terror-linked organizations, with CAIR’s chapters collecting $42.2 million of it. Two: in February, USAID’s inspector general secured a ten-year, government-wide debarment of a former UNRWA school principal over participation in the October 7 massacre, the first debarment of its kind and the model for the Forum’s anti-terrorism debarment work. Three: the Forum’s January report on the Islamist schools industry in Texas reached the state comptroller, who opened reviews that kept roughly two dozen schools out of the state’s $1 billion voucher program; a hostile ProPublica profile of our researcher Sam Westrop ended up publishing the deposition in which the comptroller’s office confirms it acted on his research; litigation has since returned schools to the program while every finding stands. Four: the Forum’s Iran Freedom Project kept Iranians connected through the longest internet blackout in the Islamic Republic’s history, with more than 470 Starlink terminals deployed inside Iran, holding 94 percent uptime across all 31 provinces by the Forum’s mid-year accounting. The Forum does not fund, direct, or take part in armed action. It keeps people connected, informed, and organized.

One more first-half file belongs on this list because it shows the method end to end. In July I published The Waqf Maneuver, a documents-based report showing that CAIR’s national headquarters passed through a $10 deed and an owner-less shell into joint control with the North American Islamic Trust, eight days after Texas designated CAIR under its terrorism statutes and while Congress weighs H.R. 8236, which would freeze the group’s assets. The report asserts no violation of law. It shows the recorded facts, names the seven documents that would answer every question, and calls on the D.C. Attorney General and the IRS to compel them. Deed registries, corporate filings, tax returns, line by line: that is what the work looks like before it becomes a headline.

What runs daily, and where the second half goes.

The standing machinery. Islamist Watch runs the investigative engine: a counter-Islamist database of more than 4 million data points and over 500 published investigations, by the Forum’s accounting. MEF Action runs the Capitol Hill arm, with roughly 200 congressional engagements and 55 bills tracked this year. The Dhimmitude Project, launched in December in honor of scholars Bat Ye’or and David Littman, published its first commissioned study in April, Rice University scholar Craig Considine’s paper on Pakistan’s 3.3 million Christians, the first in a ten-country research series. And the Iran Freedom Project’s January paper, After the Protests: Who Can Lead Iran?, designed the 28-seat National Reconciliation Council framework that gives every opposition current and every major ethnic community a seat no faction can dominate; the Iran Freedom Congress convened in London in March on compatible principles, and Foreign Policy profiled the effort in May, with the Forum’s Marty Youssefiani, who spent two decades as chief strategic counsellor to Reza Pahlavi, among its founding members.

The second-half agenda. Baghdad’s September 30 deadline makes the first item urgent: the Forum pushed Congress to condition Iraq’s security funding on demobilizing the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, and current law already withholds a quarter of one fund until Baghdad acts. The pending defense bill goes further. By the Forum’s accounting, the House version withholds 75 percent of that fund; the Senate version applies 75 percent withholding to the full $118 million Counter-ISIS account unless the Secretary of Defense certifies that Baghdad is curbing Iran-backed attacks and controlling the PMF, and directs at least half of any released funds to the Kurdish Peshmerga. Conference negotiations decide the final text this fall, and the Forum will be in those hallways. Second: the CAIR accountability track runs through three decision points, the HHS debarment ruling, H.R. 8236, and the IRS disclosure deadline the Waqf report identifies. Third: the Iran work scales, more terminals, more congress, more published architecture for the day after. Fourth: the Dhimmitude series moves to its next countries. The September briefings in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York cover all four tracks in person; details below.

Where this newsletter fits. The Insider exists to compress that work and the war it serves into something a reader can absorb in one sitting: the Board for the day’s facts, the Take for the Forum’s position, the files for the evidence. The Dispatch delivers the underlying articles three times a week. The Field Guide holds the frameworks. That is the whole system, and for the next two weeks the Dispatch carries it alone.

Two claims on one strait, and the blockade’s report card.

The claim. The President wrote Wednesday that the United States holds “total control” of the Strait of Hormuz, called the blockade “A WALL OF STEEL,” and added: “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT” (CBS, Bloomberg). Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi answered on X that Washington “has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures” and now risks “an even bigger miscalculation on the Strait of Hormuz,” closing with “Be careful” (ABC). Iran’s newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority issued its own statement: American posts “do not change the reality: the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked” (Al Jazeera). The traffic data sits under both claims: transits have sunk to near three-month lows, and the Muscat framework remains unconverted into a reopening (CNBC, Al Jazeera).

The report card. IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir told ministers the blockade is “highly effective” and that Iran’s economic crisis “is getting worse” (JPost). The deployment now reflects a long campaign: the USS George Washington is en route to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln in a previously planned rotation, per Journal reporting (RFE/RL). Across the water, Tehran completed the security consolidation Monday’s brief opened: Ali Abdollahi confirmed as armed forces chief of staff, Kioumars Heydari as his deputy, and Hossein Taeb, the hardline former intelligence chief, atop the Basij (Iran International).

The wreck. Salvors from the British firm Ambrey began work Thursday on the Caroline Bezengi, the sanctioned tanker carrying an estimated 800,000 barrels of Russian crude that ran aground June 30 beside an Omani marine reserve; the slick has spread from roughly 400 square kilometers to more than 2,000 by independent counts, oil has reached the mainland, and no insurer covers the cleanup (Reuters, NBC, Impakter). The shadow fleet’s business model prices in exactly this: no flag state that answers, no insurer that pays.

The amnesty passes, and the fronts move.

Beirut. Parliament passed the general amnesty law Wednesday, one day after abolishing the death penalty, and it passed without Hezbollah and FPM deputies in the chamber (L’Orient Today, AP). Tuesday’s brief flagged the open question, whether Hezbollah’s sequencing objection would harden; the answer arrived as a boycott. The law’s sharpest edge cuts south: former South Lebanon Army fighters who fled to Israel in 2000 stay excluded, while their family members may return if they renounce Israeli citizenship (Times of Israel, TPS). Separately, American and Israeli officials denied a report that the two governments had agreed on which countries could field a future disarmament-verification force in Lebanon; the talks continue (JPost).

Ramallah and Gaza. Hamas announced it will contest the November 28 Palestinian Legislative Council elections under “the broadest possible national coalition” (Al Jazeera, TRT). A movement that keeps its arsenal while seeking a legislature wants ratification, not participation. In the information war, Reporters Without Borders removed Gazan terror operatives from its media-casualty database after the operatives’ own organizations claimed them as fighters (JPost, HonestReporting).

The Kusra file. In the northern West Bank, extremist settlers besieged Palestinian homes near Kusra for a fourth day; after troops failed to disperse them, Zamir ordered an additional standing-army infantry battalion into the sector, and settler leaders publicly denounced the violence: “This is not our way” (JPost, JPost, CNN). Lawbreakers who tie down an IDF battalion during a two-front war serve no one’s security.

The Red Sea. Saudi Arabia is preparing operations against the Houthis by sea and possibly by land, redeploying forces and weighing support for a Yemeni ground campaign to retake the Red Sea coast, a reversal of three years of containment (Times of Israel, FDD’s Long War Journal). The reporting supports preparation, not a launched invasion; the desk carries it at that weight.

A deadline in Baghdad, a fire in Zawiya, a filing in Washington.

Baghdad. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi told CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper that September 30 stands as the final deadline for the US-led coalition’s withdrawal, and Baghdad has ordered militia groups to disarm by the same date (Al Jazeera, The National). The disarmament order names the test this brief has tracked all year: whether the Popular Mobilization Forces answer to Baghdad or to Tehran. The Forum’s legislative work on exactly that question runs in Part II above.

Zawiya. A drone strike set a gasoline storage tank ablaze at Libya’s largest operating refinery, 47 kilometers west of Tripoli; the National Oil Corporation warns it will declare force majeure if the attacks continue, and no group has claimed them (Al Jazeera, Egypt Oil & Gas).

The ICC file. Four rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights, sued the administration in federal court over sanctions on ICC prosecutors and judges (The Hill, JURIST). The sanctions answer the court’s pursuit of American and Israeli officials; the suit now asks a US court to protect the foreign tribunal from consequences. The docket will run for months, and this brief will follow it.

The percentage uptime the Forum’s 470-plus Starlink terminals held across all 31 Iranian provinces in the first half of the year, by the Forum’s mid-year accounting, while the regime ran the longest internet blackout in the Islamic Republic’s history.

The war redraws the world’s flight map.

Seoul’s Incheon airport handled 38.39 million international passengers in the first half of 2026 and overtook London Heathrow as the world’s busiest international hub for the first time, on preliminary Airports Council International figures; carriers rerouted transfer traffic away from Gulf hubs as the war closed airspace and raised insurance costs, and Incheon’s transfer passengers rose 18.1 percent (Korea JoongAng Daily, The News). The war’s costs post in unexpected columns, including airport league tables.

Registration stays open through the break. The Insider returns before Boston:

Boston · Tuesday, September 1: Bankrupt the Revolution: The Money War Against Tehran. Inside the regime’s books: the ghost fleet, the front companies, the crypto rails, and the boycott-and-divestment campaign the Forum is building to close them.

Philadelphia · Thursday, September 3: Finish the Job: What Victory over Iran Requires. The munitions spent, the production race, the case for hunting the archer rather than the arrows, and the choice between finishing the war and freezing it.

New York · Wednesday, September 9: The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life. The movement’s American franchise, and the Four D’s answer: defund, designate, debar, and force the patrons into daylight.

All briefings run 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. Seating follows annual giving: donors of $500 or more attend one event, $1,000 or more three events, $5,000 or more all events gratis; $125 per additional seat. To host an evening on the tour, write Nikki Ellis ([email protected]) and me ([email protected]). More cities and speakers to be announced.

Corrections Desk. The docket is clear this Thursday. If this issue earns a case, reply; the desk reads everything on return, and corrections run in the first issue back.

Forward this issue to a colleague who should know what the Forum does. If the mid-year record above is work you want continued, support it directly, subscribe to the Dispatch, and reserve a September seat.

One question to hold for two weeks: which of the Forum’s four tracks, the money war, the CAIR file, the Iran lifeline, or the dhimmitude record, matters most to you? Reply; I read every answer when I am back. See you in two weeks.