Posted tagged ‘Obama and Iran’

« WarSclerotic home page
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Iranian Ayatollah Shirazi: America Is No Longer What It Used to Be; Iran Has Global Final Say

May 23, 2016

Iranian Ayatollah Shirazi: America Is No Longer What It Used to Be; Iran Has Global Final Say, MEMRI-TV via YouTube, May 23, 2016

(You should probably turn the audio off; someone in the background is attempting, poorly, a simultaneous translation. — DM)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BdlosMQoF8

The blurb beneath the video states,

Qom-Based Iranian Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said in an interview with Lebanese channel Mayadeen TV that the U.S. and Britain are no longer what they used to be and that “Iran now has the final say in the progress of events in the world.” In light of the progress of Iranian ideology, Ayatollah Shirazi said, it is “somewhat realistic” to say that “one of these days we shall hear the azan call to prayer in America.” Ayatollah Shirazi accused the U.S. of trying to ignite a sectarian war in the region as an alternative to the lifted sanctions. The interview aired on May 19.

Categories: Foreign policy, Iran - world power, Iran scam, Iranian media, Obama and Iran, Obama's foreign failures
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Media Outlet Funded By Pro-Iran Deal ‘Echo Chamber’ Group Silenced Top Deal Critic

May 23, 2016

Media Outlet Funded By Pro-Iran Deal ‘Echo Chamber’ Group Silenced Top Deal Critic, Washington Free Beacon, , May 23, 2016

FILE - In this Oct. 16, 2015, photo, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, speaks to the media on Capitol Hill in Washington. Pompeo is a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The third-term Kansas congressman is a member of the House Intelligence committee. Before he was appointed to the Benghazi panel, he said he believed the American people were misled by the White House and intelligence was withheld from the public. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

FILE – In this Oct. 16, 2015, photo, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, speaks to the media on Capitol Hill in Washington.  (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A prominent media outlet that received money from a White House-backed group of Iran deal advocates refused interviews with a top congressional critic of last summer’s nuclear agreement, deepening accusations that the Obama administration and its allies suppressed voices opposing the deal, according to conversations with sources and a series of emails viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The publicly funded National Public Radio declined interviews with Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a leading critic of the Iran nuclear deal. NPR had received funding from the liberal Ploughshares Fund, which has been exposed as being a core part of a White House-backed campaign to push lobbyists, policy analysts, and journalists in favor of the deal.

When asked by reporters last week about refusing the interviews, NPR suggested that Pompeo’s office had never reached out to the station. However, multiple emails viewed by the Free Beacon demonstrate that Pompeo’s office had been in two separate talks with NPR producers about scheduling an interview.

These developments threaten to entangle NPR in a growing scandal over the White House’s coordinated efforts to mislead Congress and the American people about the contents of the nuclear accord.

The Ploughshares Fund, which coordinated with the White House to sell the deal, gave NPR hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Free Beacon initially disclosed in 2012. Ploughshares also gave high dollar donations to a range of other media outlets and organizations.

Top White House official Ben Rhodes said in a recent interview that he created a pro-Iran “echo chamber” with “outside groups like Ploughshares” at the center of the spin operation.

Rhodes’ operation, which was staffed by other top officials in the White House National Security Council, ignited a media firestorm and has led to congressional investigations, including calls for President Barack Obama to fire Rhodes.

Emails viewed by the Free Beacon show that NPR—which received $100,000 from Ploughshares in 2015 and has been taking money from the group since at least 2012—cancelled a 2015 interview with Pompeo while featuring others, including Iran deal supporters.

NPR told the Associated Press last week that it “had no record of Pompeo’s requests” for an interview. However, theFree Beacon has viewed two separate email conversations between NPR producers and Pompeo’s office.

NPR said Monday when reached by the Free Beacon that it had in fact been in contact with Pompeo’s office.

“The pieces are coming together on President Obama’s machinations in selling the Iran deal. As Obama administration officials admit to misrepresenting reality on the deal, it is clear that the American people have been played,” Pompeo, a member of the House intelligence committee, told the Free Beacon on Monday. “Specifically, recent statements and financial documents raise serious concerns about the integrity of the Ploughshares Fund, NPR, which is partly tax-payer funded, and the entire nuclear deal debate.”

“Unfortunately,” Pompeo said, “instead of coming clean, groups like NPR continue to distort facts. For example, NPR told the AP that it had ‘no record’ of my multiple interview requests, though it had actually cancelled on me, as it now admits. This comes on top of refusing or ignoring my multiple requests to be on their programs. It is important that the American people continue to look into this questionable relationship.”

An NPR producer contacted Pompeo’s office on Aug. 4, 2015, to schedule an interview with the lawmaker, according to an email viewed by the Free Beacon.

“We’d like to do this but not live tomorrow morning. Can we schedule a tape time for tomorrow morning or Thursday to air in Friday’s show? This will give us more time to figure out better audio options as well,” NPR producer Kenya Young wrote to Pompeo’s office, according to a copy of the email.

“Let’s aim for Thursday morning at 10am Eastern,” Young wrote later in the day. “I’ll assign a producer in the morning who will get in touch with you, confirm a time, and set up an engineer to tape sync the interview in Kansas. Thanks for reaching out. You’ll hear from someone on my team in the morning.”

NPR decided to nix the interview the following morning.

Vince Pearson, a producer with NPR’s Morning Edition, informed Pompeo’s office on Aug. 5, 2015, that the interview was now off the table.

“I’m writing to say that we will have to pass on the interview with Congressman Pompeo,” Pearson wrote. “The show managers have decided that there are already too many interviews in the works this week and that we don’t have the resources to take this one on. Perhaps there will be another opportunity.”

The producer could not say why NPR had featured Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), a backer of the deal, for multiple interviews about the agreement.

NPR Morning Edition producer Kitty Eisele later declined a Sept. 7, 2015, offer to have Pompeo appear on the program, according to subsequent correspondence viewed by the Free Beacon.

“Morning Edition is a bit full on Iran at the moment. I’m glad to be in touch and hope you’ll check back with us for future conversations,” Eisele wrote to Pompeo’s office.

A NPR spokesman told the Free Beacon on Monday that it had in fact been in contact with Pompeo’s office, despite earlier statements to the AP.

“Rep. Pompeo was booked to discuss the Iran deal in August 2015, but the interview did not take place,” the spokesman said. “In the past year, other prominent Republican officials have appeared on our newsmagazines to discuss the Iran deal or were the focus of related stories about economic sanctions.” This includes Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), John McCain (R., Ariz.), Kelly Ayotte, (R., N.H.), and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.).

“Ploughshares cannot in any way influence how we cover stories or who we interview,” the spokesman maintained. “As with all support NPR receives, we have a rigorous editorial firewall process in place to ensure our coverage is independent and is not influenced by funders or special interests.”

Ploughshares has boasted of its efforts to back the nuclear deal, posting a video and lengthy article describing “How we won.”

NPR did not respond to follow up questions asking why it initially told the AP that it had no contact with Pompeo’s office.

Categories: Bribery, Federal Government, Iran scam, Media, Obama and Iran, Obama's echo chamber
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Obama Admin Will Not Commit to Barring Iranian Access to U.S. Dollar

May 19, 2016

Obama Admin Will Not Commit to Barring Iranian Access to U.S. Dollar, Washington Free Beacon, , May 19, 2016

(On and on it goes; where it stops or if it will nobody knows. — DM)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a media conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, May 19, 2016. NATO foreign ministers this week will discuss how the alliance can deal more effectively with security threats outside Europe, including by training the Iraqi military and cooperating with the European Union to choke off people-smuggling operations in the central Mediterranean. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a media conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, May 19, 2016.  (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

The Obama administration will not commit to halting its effort to help Iran access the U.S. dollar, despite past commitments to do so, according to a new congressional inquiry obtained by the Washington Free Beacon into the Treasury Department’s refusal to uphold its promises.

Leading senators are threatening to block all consideration of Treasury Department nominees until the administration ends its bid “to enable Iranian access to U.S. dollars” throughout the international financial system, according to a letter sent Thursday to the Treasury Department by Sens. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Mark Kirk (R., Ill.).

Potential Iranian access to the U.S. dollar has caused friction between Congress and the Obama administration, which initially vowed during negotiations with Iran that such a move was out of the question.

However, senior administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have publicly sought to encourage Europeans to reengage in business with the Islamic Republic following last summer’s comprehensive nuclear agreement.

“We want to make it clear that legitimate business, which is clear under the definition of the agreement, is available to banks,” Kerry said in London last week.

The administration has been intentionally side-stepping questions about methods to give Iran backdoor access to the U.S. dollar, according to senior congressional sources informed of the matter.

The administration has assured lawmakers it will not grant Iran direct access to the U.S. financial system. However, it will not discuss backdoor methods in which U.S. dollars are given to Iran via international banks, source said.

“Whenever the administration gets asked whether it’ll allow Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime access to dollarized transactions outside of the U.S. financial system, a transaction that some people are starting to refer to as ‘Z-turn’ transactions, it flat-out avoids the question and instead says it doesn’t plan to allow Iran to engage in so-called ‘U-turn’ transactions or direct access to the U.S. financial system, something which lawmakers already know,” the source explained.

“This is the equivalent of giving an answer about oranges when you’ve been repeatedly asked about apples, and doesn’t change the fact that the critical questions about ‘Z-turn’ transactions for Iran really need to be clearly answered by the Treasury Department, once and for all,” the source said.

The apparent shift in the administration’s rhetoric on the issue has deepened concerns on Capitol Hill about alleged White House efforts to mislead Congress and the American people about the contents of the nuclear deal.

Rubio and Kirk are threatening to block all Treasury Department nominees from Senate consideration until the Obama administration answers questions about efforts to help Iran get access to U.S. dollars in the international marketplace, according to the letter obtained by the Free Beacon.

“We are disappointed that you ignored the request in the March 30th letter from Senators Rubio and Kirk to provide ‘assurances that the United States will not work on behalf of Iran to enable Iranian access to U.S. dollars elsewhere in the international financial system, including assisting Iran in gaining access to dollar payment systems outside the U.S. financial system,’” the senators wrote. “We do not support the consideration of Treasury Department nominees until our request is directly answered.”

Kirk and Rubio initially petitioned the Treasury Department in March to seek firm assurances that officials would commit to blocking Iranian access to the U.S. dollar.

The Treasury Department, in a May 11 response to Kirk and Rubio’s initial inquiry, declined to address specific questions regarding efforts to promote Iranian access to the U.S. dollar via foreign transactions outside the American financial system.

A month ago, the Obama administration launched a quiet push on Capitol Hill to reassure lawmakers that it would not grant Iran any access to the U.S. dollar or American financial markets, according to a Free Beacon report at the time.

That stance appears to have shifted in recent weeks, prompting concern from Iran deal critics such as Rubio and Kirk.

The Obama administration is now going above and beyond the purview of the nuclear agreement to help boost Iran’s economy, the senators allege.

“In its determined effort to provide Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime with benefits that were not expressly included in the ill-conceived Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Administration is on a path toward undermining the reputation of the United States as a global leader in antimoney laundering and countering terrorism financing,” they write.

“Access to the U.S. dollar is not an international right. But if Tehran wants access, the onus should be entirely on Iran to clean up its act—including by verifiably ending its sponsorship and financing of terrorism, its ballistic missile program, and its human rights abuses against the peoples of Iran and other nations—and reduce the risks that any financial transaction with Iran poses to the global financial community,” the letter states.

The outgoing Obama administration is waging a public campaign to encourage businesses to reenter the Iranian market place, which has been known as a key front for money laundering and terrorism funding, despite Iran’s continued pursuit of ballistic missile technology, which could carry a nuclear payload over great distances.

“Sadly, the Administration appears to be more focused in capitulating to Tehran than in forcing Iran’s terror regime to fundamentally change its behavior,” the lawmakers write. “It’s high time for the U.S. to stop making unreciprocated concessions and to start holding Iran fully accountable for continuing its dangerous and destructive behavior.”

The Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to hold two hearings on Iran next week and sources disclosed that this issue will be a primary focus for Congress.

Categories: Europe, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran and dollar trade, Kerry, Obama and Iran, U.S. Congress
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Renegade Jew Backlash

May 19, 2016

Renegade Jew Backlash, Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz, May 19, 2016

wc_1

Reprinted from Breitbart.

According to the Internet Webster synonyms for renegade are “defector” and “deserter.” I applied the term to Kristol because of his efforts to launch a third party campaign to block the nominee of his party, split the conservative vote, and ensure the election of a Democrat whose party had provided a path to nuclear weapons to the Jews’ mortal enemy (and America’s as well).

***************************

I have been accused of being a provocateur all my life – when I was a leftist in the 60s proclaiming (God help me) that Vietnam was the fulfillment of the American dream; when I left the left declaring that, “the beginning of political morality is anti-Communism;” when I said that identity politics “owed more to Mussolini than to Marx;” when I opposed reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact because it was “bad for blacks and racist too;” and when I organized “Islamo-fascism Awareness Weeks on a hundred college campuses across the country. Now I have provoked a firestorm on the Internet through a Breitbart article that called Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.”

According to the Internet Webster synonyms for renegade are “defector” and “deserter.” I applied the term to Kristol because of his efforts to launch a third party campaign to block the nominee of his party, split the conservative vote, and ensure the election of a Democrat whose party had provided a path to nuclear weapons to the Jews’ mortal enemy (and America’s as well). I picked the emotional term “renegade” because I wanted to shock Kristol and his co-conspirators into realizing the gravity of their actions.

However, I had no idea that this would provoke the reaction it did. A veritable tsunami of attacks were directed at Breitbart and myself from Kristol’s supporters on the “neo-conservative” right and from die-hard enemies of the Republican nominee in all political quarters. Even the Anti-Defamation League, which had once attacked me over my anti-reparations campaign) chimed in, calling the title of my piece “inappropriate and offensive.” This was actually pretty mild considering others were denouncing it as “disgraceful” and “an anti-Semitic slur.”

How by the way is the characterization “anti-Semitic slur” even possible? Are Jews immune to defecting from causes? When I publicly repudiated the radical cause, thirty years ago, the first attack on me appeared in the Village Voice under the title, “The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz.” It was written by Paul Berman, who years later became a somewhat chastened radical himself. Berman’s attack stung me – as I hoped my charge would sting Kristol and cause him to reconsider his course. But the epithet didn’t bother anybody but me. My current critics would stigmatize me not only as a defector from the conservative cause but as a double agent who never really left the left. After my Breitbart article appeared, Commentary editor (and Kristol relative) John Podhoretz sent me a one-line email: “Once a Stalinist always a Stalinist,” while Commentary writer Jonathan Tobin in a piece titled “Breitbart ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace,” suggest: “You can take the boy out of the Bolsheviks but you can’t take the Bolshevik out of the boy.”

Like many of the attacks on Trump, these squalid responses with their flimsy intellectual content call to mind a famous remark of Lionel Trilling’s, made more than 60 years ago. Conservatives, he wrote, did not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas.” It is not that Kristol or his defender Tobin haven’t had worthy and defensible ideas. They have. But this makes it even sadder to see the flimsy arguments they trot out to discredit Trump and to defend Kristol’s indefensible campaign. Criticisms of Trump’s personal attacks on his Republican rivals are reasonable. But not when they fail to take into account the 60,000 political ads that were aired by those same rivals whose purpose was to destroy him. (The ads were not, should anybody have missed them, about policies and issues.)

I have no quarrel with people who have doubts about what Trump would do if elected. It is the task of the candidate to allay those doubts. For reasonable critics Trump’s announcement of his prospective Supreme Court nominees should be important steps along the way. My quarrel is not with Trump skeptics, but with the effort to nullify the vote of the Republican electorate – a politically active and informed, and conservative segment of that electorate. Kristol’s third party effort exudes an elitist contempt for the will of the people, which is particularly unbecoming in a crowd that prides itself on being “constitutional conservatives.”

Finally, I am disturbed by the failure of the nullifiers to consider the perils of the choices our country now faces. For the life of me I cannot understand how my friends in the conservative movement cannot have qualms about derailing the candidacy of the Republican Party’s pro-Israel, pro-military, pro-American nominee, and electing the candidate of a party that has built its foreign policy around making Islamist Iran the number one power in the Middle East, providing its jihadists with a path to nuclear weapons, putting $150 billion into their terrorist war chest and turning a blind eye to their circumvention of international restrictions so that they can build ballistic missiles capable of destroying the Jewish state and causing incalculable damage to the United States.

Categories: Antisemitism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian Threats, Never Trumpers, Nuclear War, Obama - rogue president, Obama and Iran, Obama and Israel
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Iran Ramps Up Crackdown on Women

May 18, 2016

Iran Ramps Up Crackdown on Women, Front Page Magazine, Ari Lieberman May 18, 2016

women_in_shiraz_2

On Sunday, the Islamic Republic announced the arrest of eight women whose photographs were featured on Instagram. The models reportedly failed to adhere to stifling Islamic style dress codes rigorously enforced by Iran’s oppressive mullahs. More specifically, they posed without wearing religiously sanctioned head scarves designed to cover exposed hair.

Following her arrest, one of the models was forced to appear on Iranian TV in the presence of two prosecutors. Wearing a black head scarf and matching black gloves, she was recorded – almost certainly under duress – sanctioning the government’s Orwellian-like actions, warning other Iranian women that they “can be certain that no man would want to marry a model whose fame has come by losing her honor.” As an aside, when Iranian navy pirates operating off Farsi Island kidnapped 10 U.S. Navy sailors in the Arabian Gulf in January, they forced a female sailor into Sharia compliance, requiring her to don a hijab.

The arrests come in the midst of a yet another government crackdown on social media and dissent. The anti-social media operation, ominously codenamed “Spider II” has thus far netted dozens of models, photographers, makeup artists and other dangerous enemies of the state. Also arrested was Iranian blogger Mahdi Boutorabi who reportedly covered Iran’s rigged 2009 elections. It appears that periodically, the mullahs get bored or insecure and conjure up ways to make the lives of their citizens more miserable.

But the Islamic Republic’s absurdity doesn’t end there. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard bizarrely accused reality star (and not much else) Kim Kardashian-West of being behind the nefarious plot to undermine or otherwise taint the morals of Iran’s young women.

Mostafa Alizadeh, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard’s Organized Cyberspace Crimes Unit stated that, “Ms. Kim Kardashian is a popular fashion model so Instagram’s CEO tells her, ‘make this native.’” He added that “There is no doubt that financial support is involved as well. We are taking this very seriously.”

In February, Iranian authorities engaged in a similar crackdown, targeting a benign rock group known as “Confess.” Authorities charged the group’s members with “blasphemy,” writing “satanic” lyrics and meeting with forbidden foreign radio stations. The charge of “blasphemy” carries a punishment of execution. Others in the Islamic Republic have been arrested and sentenced to lashings for merely appearing in a YouTube video while dancing and lip syncing to Pharrell’s hit song “Happy.”

Conspiracy theories and political and religious oppression are the norm in the Islamic Republic. Let us dispel with the notion that there are “moderate” forces within the Iranian government working to change things for the better. Power in that tyrannical regime vests with two entities – Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” the Holocaust-denying Ayatollah Khamenei and his thuggish henchmen of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia.

The Obama administration and its “echo chamber” (as Obama shill Ben Rhodes puts it) would like us to think that there are moderate elements and reformers with whom we can deal. That notion is an absolute farce but continues to gain credence in some leftist circles with vested interests in propagating this false narrative. For example, while the New York Times reported the arrest of the Iranian models, it made sure to qualify its reportage by informing its readers that the crackdown was the work of “hard liners.”

In the meantime, while Ben Rhodes is creating his spin and John Kerry is thanking the Iranians for kidnapping and mistreating U.S. Navy sailors, the mullahs of the Islamic republic continue to crack down on dissent and execute human rights activists, continue to advance their ballistic missile program (in defiance of UNSC resolutions) and continue to cut a path of misery and destruction in the Mideast, from Syria to Yemen.

The administration has done its best to convince the American public that Iran can be trusted to keep agreements. This rests on the false and dangerous narrative that there exists a power struggle in Iran between moderate reformers who have the support of the people and an assortment of hard line religious extremists and anti-Western zealots. Narratives running counter to this fantasy-like version of events are dismissed by the administration.

Even worse, it has now come to light that the Obama administration has asked the Iranians not to publicize their illicit ballistic missile activities for fear of unsettling opponents of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Meanwhile John Kerry is quietly attempting to encourage various European banking institutions to do business with the Iranians despite the fact that the IRGC controls vast swaths of Iran’s economy.

No matter how much spin the Obama administration attempts to place on the merits of the JCPOA and no matter how much it attempts to cover its tracks, it cannot hide the fact that the Islamic Republic is a pernicious regime that cannot be trusted and represents a malignancy that sooner or later will have to be confronted. The only question that remains is whether Iran will have nuclear bombs when that time arrives.

Categories: Iran - human rights, Iran and women, Iran lobby, Iran scam, Iran's morality police, Iranian "moderates", Iranian missiles, Obama and Iran, Obama's America, Obama's echo chamber
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Why Is The Iran Report On The Treatment Of U.S. Sailor’s Still Classified?

May 17, 2016

Why Is The Iran Report On The Treatment Of U.S. Sailor’s Still Classified? Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, May 17, 2016

US Sailors

[T]he full details of the treatment of the sailors after they were taken into custody is obviously known to Iran . . . it is simply not known to the American people.

******************

We previously discussed how the government has kept 28 pages classified in the 9-11 Report to protect Saudi Arabia from a public backlash of its alleged involvement (or at least the involvement of Saudi officials) in the attacks. Now, a report on the treatment of U.S. sailors by Iran in seizure of Navy boats earlier this year will reportedly remain classified for some time. That is rather curious since Iran already knows how it treated the sailors. Again, there is a suspicion that the Administration simply does not want the public to know the full details of the mistreatment, which Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, says are far worse than has been made public. Recently, the Navy fired the commander in the incident.


The 10 sailors were captured and their high-speed special boats were seized when they drifted into Iranian waters around Farsi Island. They were held for 16 hours and the Iranians used videotapes of sailors apologizing and crying for propaganda purposes.

Now, Forbes (who was given a classified briefing) alleges that the Administration is keeping details of the incident classified for a year or longer. He stated “I think that when the details actually come out, most Americans are going to be kind of taken aback by the entire incident, both how Iran handled it and how we handled it.”

I fail to see why the description of the treatment cannot be released immediately. I can understand the need to review and potentially classify the conditions leading to the seizure. There are issues of communications and diplomatic exchanges are likely sensitive. However, the full details of the treatment of the sailors after they were taken into custody is obviously known to Iran . . . it is simply not known to the American people.

Source: Fox

Categories: Iran, Iran scam, Iranian navy, Obama and Iran, U.S. Navy
Tags: , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Iran’s Soft War Against America

May 17, 2016

Iran’s Soft War Against America, Gatestone Institute, Lawrence A. Franklin, May 17, 2016

♦ Iran’s sophisticated employment of asymmetrical tactics such as “soft war” — which relies on the other side’s wishes, conscious or not, to be taken in — is apparently part of Tehran’s strategy to level the playing field against the U.S., despite America’s overwhelming military superiority.

♦ Iran is now being treated by most of the world as a normal nation-state rather than the revolutionary, terror-supporting, totalitarian regime that in reality it is.

Iran is waging a “soft war” offensive — media, social media, charm — against the United States. Tehran believes it is scoring significant victories in this war, and it clearly has, as can be seen by the so-called “Iran deal” — technically no “deal” at all: one side, Iran, got everything.

Iran’s sophisticated employment of asymmetrical tactics, such as “soft war” — which relies on the other side’s wishes, conscious or not, to be taken in — is apparently part of Tehran’s strategy to level the playing field against the U.S., despite America’s overwhelming military superiority.

Tehran seems to think, with justification, that it has successfully exploited the Obama administration’s uncorseted desire for better bilateral relations into granting Iran concessions that are not part of the original Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA).

One of these concessions is granting Iran access to the U.S financial system; U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spent last week trawling through Europe, imploring bankers to do business with Iran, despite that minor detail that America will not.

Another concession is the U.S. offer to buy Iran’s heavy water, a product of its planned plutonium bomb-making reactor in Arak.

Still another concession is the U.S. administration’s failure to increase sanctions on Iran for repeatedly launching potentially nuclear-capable ballistic missiles — in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

The Iranian regime may well attribute these American concessions to its employment of the “jang-e-narm” (soft war) tactic of “smile diplomacy”: the media-friendly demeanor of President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

767 (1)The Iranian regime may well attribute recent American concessions to its employment of the soft war tactic of “smile diplomacy”: the media-friendly demeanor of President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Pictured: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during talks in Vienna, Austria, July 14, 2014. (Image source: U.S. State Department)

Not surprisingly, those are the same tactics that Iran is accusing Washington of using against Iran. Iran has been alleging that the U.S. has been waging soft war attacks against it, via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, supposedly — according to Iran — to develop sympathies within Iran’s elites for Western culture, policies, and ideals. Presumably the next concession is that the U.S. be quiet and let Iran keep expanding as far as it likes. The other day, Iran threatened to block the transport of oil by closing the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

This is the problem: Iran is now being treated by most of the world as a normal nation-state rather than the revolutionary, terror-supporting, totalitarian regime that in reality it is.

Iran also is using this narrative of an American-led soft war against Iran to institute tighter controls on Iranian citizens. Iran recently dispatched Basij paramilitary teams to elementary schools to instill revolutionary Islamic values in the students. Iran has also established “Atlas,” a new, government-controlled press agency modeled upon Qatar’s Al-Jazeera network. Iranian authorities most likely hope that this news service will counteract any untoward thoughts of liberalization that the “Arab Spring” might have conjured up to question the regime’s “stability.”[1]Iran has also stepped up internet censorship as well as efforts by the government’s plainclothes police to sever contacts between Western NGO personnel and Iran’s civil society activists.

Evidence of how seriously Iran views the potential of America’s supposed soft war tactics was its establishing a National Data Center to filter messages coming into Iran from Western media, in addition to Tehran’s sponsorship of its first National Forum on Soft War, in the autumn of 2015.

Meanwhile, pursuing both its hard war and soft war offensives, Iran continues to trumpet its ability to produce new weapons systems, including novel and illegal ballistic missiles.

The regime also boasts about its acquisition of weapons from outside the country, such as Russia’s S-300 air defense system.

Not surprisingly, this soft war saber-rattling by Shi’ite Iran has been increasing the security concerns of its neighboring Sunni Arab States. These concerns, in turn, cause the Gulf countries and others to demand that their American ally demonstrate that it is serious about halting Iranian expansion in the region. Recent visits to the Sunni states by high-level American political leaders (President Obama), ranking diplomats (Secretary of State John Kerry), and senior military figures (Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dunford) have sought to allay these fears; it is still not clear with what.

Meanwhile, Iran’s aggressive involvement in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq is clearly creating the impression among Gulf states and others that regional leadership is passing from Sunni Saudi Arabia onto a toxic Shi’ite Iran.

Categories: Free world, Iran scam, Iranian "moderates", Kerry, Obama and Iran
Tags: , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Inside the Pro-Iran ‘Echo Chamber’

May 16, 2016

Inside the Pro-Iran ‘Echo Chamber’ Washington Free Beacon, , May 16, 2016

ayatollah

A White House-allied group funded a private email listserv that pushed out pro-Iran talking points and anti-Israel conspiracy theories to hundreds of influential policy experts, government officials, and journalists during the Iran nuclear debate.

The contents of the invite-only listserv, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, could give a glimpse inside the “echo chamber” used by White House aide Ben Rhodes and allied lobbying groups to promote the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Members of the list included an Obama White House adviser, senior officials at the State Department, journalists for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and fellows at prominent think tanks.

The email forum, known as “Gulf/2000,” was originally created by Columbia University professor and former Jimmy Carter aide Gary Sick in 1993.

Since 2010, Gulf/2000’s operations have been funded by the Ploughshares Fund, a group that worked closely with the White House to promote the Iran nuclear deal.

In a New York Times article earlier this month, President Obama’s foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes said the Ploughshares Fund was part of the administration’s spin operation to sell the public on the agreement.

“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else,” Rhodes said. “So we knew the tactics that worked.”

Gulf/2000 is still run out of Columbia University, where it is curated by Sick. Over the last two decades, Sick built the group into the predominant email list for Gulf State policy experts across the ideological spectrum.

The vast majority of posts on the forum are news articles, but occasionally members weigh in with their own comments. Posts are pre-approved by Sick or his assistants, and insiders say the forum is “dominated” by pro-Iran talking points.

One former member, who left Gulf/2000 several years ago because “90 percent of the traffic was either useless or promoting the official lines,” said the comments that were approved for posting seemed to follow an ideological slant.

“Gary [Sick] was the moderator, and the moderator is supposed to moderate,” said the former member. “And I learned after awhile, it was quite obvious, that Gary was filtering and navigating more toward his views of the world on all these issues.”

Sick said he was unable to discuss Gulf/2000 because he was traveling for the next few weeks. He declined to answer questions by email.

Joe Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, did not respond to a request for comment. In a column last week, Cirincione disputed allegations that the Ploughshares Fund took orders from the White House about how to sell the Iran deal.

Gulf/2000 members said the forum posts, which are supposed to focus on Gulf State policy issues, often veer into defenses of the Iranian regime or conspiracy theories about Israel. Another member, speaking on background to theWashington Free Beacon, compared the group to a pro-Iran “info-op”—military jargon for a campaign to influence policy decisions.

“The most significant forum for scholars of Iranian studies to exchange ideas and views was dominated by apologists for the Iranian regime and was dominated by people who would reflexively push back on any argument that the Iranian regime was involved in what we would call ‘malign activities’ or ‘illicit activities,’” said the member, who added that the majority of his colleagues who work on Gulf issues belong to the forum.

The Ploughshares Fund said it finances Gulf/2000 in order to “inform the debate over Iran’s nuclear program in the media and among policymakers by assessing and reporting on events, generating viable solutions and refuting false stories,” according to its annual reports. The foundation has given the email list $75,000 a year since 2010.

Gulf/2000 is linked to a larger messaging effort on the Iran deal that has been reported on by the Free Beacon and other outlets.

In October 2014, the Free Beacon published audio recordings from a since-discontinued strategy meeting between the White House and activist groups lobbying for the nuclear deal. During the session, Rhodes stressed that the agreement was “the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.”

Last summer, the Free Beacon posted tapes from a private conference call with progressive groups organized by the Ploughshares Fund that discussed how to sell the Iran deal to congressional Democrats.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are calling on Rhodes to testify about his comments to the Times, which seemed to suggest the administration misled the public and created an “echo chamber” in order to get the deal through.

Members of Gulf/2000 include activists and writers who worked closely with the Obama administration on Iran issues. One is Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council, a lobbying group working to repeal Iran sanctions. Another is Al-Monitor reporter Laura Rozen, who a White House aide described as her “RSS feed” on Iran in the Timesarticle. Cirincione is also on the list.

Other members have included Puneet Talwar, a senior State Department official and former advisor to Joe Biden in the Senate and White House; John Limbert, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran; and Tamara Cofman Wittes, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.

Many of the email list’s regular contributors are bloggers and academics: Jim Lobe and Marsha Cohen, writers for the anti-Israel website LobeLog; Flynt and Hillary Leverett, authors of the book “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran”; Truthout writer Gareth Porter; and Cyrus Safdari, a commentator at Iran Review. Gulf/2000 also includes a number of current and former Iranian scholars who work at state-controlled universities or think tanks.

The Free Beacon reviewed hundreds of posts sent to the listserv between 2010 and 2015. Many contain theories about the “Israel Lobby’s” destructive influence over U.S. foreign policy and politicians, defenses of the Iranian government, and comments downplaying news stories that cast the regime in a negative light.

Although some Gulf/2000 members are strong critics of the Iranian government, particularly on human rights, many of the most active posters are vocal defenders of the regime.

“Perhaps above all, one of the greatest benefits of this [Iran] deal has been to put some limits, at least for the time being, on the Israeli Lobby and their rightwing supporters in the Congress,” wrote Farhang Jahanpour, a former dean at a state-run Iranian university, in 2013.

Other posts talked about the necessity of “breaking the power of the domestic Israel lobby” and the “neo-con cabal” that were allegedly the main threats to the Iran deal.

“The Neo-Cons have convinced themselves that no costs of human life outweigh the moral benefits they see of ridding Israel of any perceived military threat by pre-active lethal military force,” wrote David Long in January 2013.

The forum is also littered with conspiracy theories about the Israeli government and foreign affairs. In one post, retired journalist Richard Sale claimed the CIA told him that pro-Israel Christian groups were “secretly funded by Mossad.” In another, Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich speculated that the Iranian-backed bombing of the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center was actually a false flag operation by the Argentine government to cover up its complicity with the Nazis.

Although Gulf/2000 is ostensibly a forum to discuss Gulf policy issues, the listserv’s fixation with “neocons” and the “Israel lobby” is not new. In 2003, a Lebanese columnist named Jihad Al Khazen published a series of lengthy posts on Gulf/2000 that purported to tell the “Biographies of the Neo-Cons.” His subjects included Bill Kristol, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and Robert Kagan.

At the time, members also debated the correlation between “neo-cons” and Jews.

“It is certainly true that not every supporter of the [Iraq] war is Jewish, but it is definitely true that every supporter of the war with Iraq is a supporter of the most extreme Israeli right-wing. The coincidence is hard to ignore,” noted William Beeman.

Occasionally a contributor would push back on the forum’s general consensus.

“I am puzzled by the consistent tone of dismissal of any allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Iran by members of this list,” wrote one poster in 2003. “These charges are lumped together as either the baseless allegations of the US government, or worse, the product of a secret Jewish-neocon plot to discredit an Iran which would never, ever participate in terrorism.”

But a former forum member said Sick would often cut off conversations as “off-topic” when commenters tried to defend Israel against charges.

“There were clearly cases where there were things that were said about Israel, or written, posted about Israel, that were false, defamatory, absurd,” said the former member.

On March 5, 2014, the day the Israeli military announced it had intercepted an Iranian shipment of advanced rockets to Gaza, the news was greeted with typical suspicion in the forum.

“Call me a cynic, but it does seem like amazingly fortuitous timing: just when the IAEA have resisted Israel’s call to publish the claims (probably) Israel leaked, and while Bibi is tub-thumping to AIPAC in Washington ,” wrote James Spencer, a blogger for LobeLog.

“[S]omething did not jibe with this story. It is just a little bit too convenient,” agreed another poster.

“I can’t take that narrative at face value,” added Thomas Lippman, former Middle East bureau chief of the Washington Post.

“As James Spencer and Walter Posch noted the timing is suspicious, occurring as the AIPAC conference convened with Netanyahu in Washington,” wrote Charles Smith, a professor at the University of Arizona.

When the Iranian government weighed in on the arms seizure the day after the story broke, its response was similar.

“An Iranian ship carrying arms for Gaza. Captured just in time for annual AIPAC anti Iran campaign. Amazing Coincidence! Or same failed lies,” wrote Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Twitter.

Another common refrain in posts is that there is no evidence Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

“Like other counter-factual mythologies (President Obama’s birthplace, the identity of the Kennedy assassin, Jimmy Hoffa’s killer), this one seemingly will never die–at least as long as the neo-cons are alive to fan the last of its faint sparks,” wrote William O. Beeman, an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota.

An official at an Iranian university, whose name was withheld, claimed the notion that Iran was seeking a bomb was driven by “Iranophobia.”

“Iran repeatedly has said that it doesn’t pursue the way of reaching to Atomic bomb,” said the poster. “What makes the US doesn’t believe this is exactly rooted to what Mr. Aboutalebi described it in his interview as Iranophobia.”

Posts also defend Iran against allegations of human rights violations by suggesting the claims are intended to undermine moderates or denying the charges altogether.

“[A]s the nuclear issue has become effectively – for now – insulated due to the support of Khamenei, critics are seeking to undermine Rouhani through other issues,” wrote Parsi in March 2014. “Human rights – due to the impact it has on Rouhani’s external image and the impact that can have on negotiations – appears to be one such issue.”

Other commenters were less subtle than Parsi.

“The Leveretts said it best: Ahmadinejad won those elections; get over it already,” argued blogger Safdari in December 2013.

One former member expressed concern that the influential listserv was being used to whitewash the Iranian government.

“If the Iranian regime wanted to push back on any assertion against it … it could not do a better job itself than the American academics and pundits who do it on Gulf/2000,” he said.

Categories: Iran lobby, Iran scam, Israel, Jews, Media, national security, Obama and Iran, Obama and the media
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Obama’s Animus toward Israel May Lead to War

May 15, 2016

Obama’s Animus toward Israel May Lead to War, American Thinker, Victor Sharpe and Robert Vincent, May 15, 2016

Will the looming conclusion of the Obama presidency lead him to engineer an all-out war by Iran’s terror surrogates, Hamas and Hezbollah, against the embattled Jewish state?  Will that war conveniently occur in December 2016, as Obama serves out the final days of his presidency?

Is it conceivable that the pro-Muslim president of the United States will use such a conflict to predictably and mendaciously blame Israel as a means to permanently fracture the U.S.-Israeli alliance in a manner that would be difficult for any successor to repair?  As extreme as this may sound, it is entirely possible in view of Obama’s past acts of blatant hatred toward America’s one and only true democracy and ally in the Middle East.

As should be obvious by now, Obama believes that Islam has suffered from British and European Christian colonization and oppression.  After being thoroughly prepared to be receptive to this message by his stridently anti-Western mother and maternal grandparents, such was the indoctrination Obama received from Khaled al-Mansour – a Muslim high-level adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and anti-Jewish hate-monger – during his formative years.

It was al-Mansour who helped Obama gain admittance to the Harvard Law School.  Edward Said, an outspoken anti-Israel professor of Obama’s at Columbia University, and Rashid Khalidi, a former press agent for Yasser Arafat’s PLO, served as Obama’s mentor in the former case and friend in the latter.

These figures, whose entire professional adult lives had been essentially dedicated to eliminating Israel, focused on influencing Obama to support the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians – along with their thugocracy known as the Palestinian Authority.  These overwhelmingly Muslim terrorists amount to little more than cannon fodder in the ongoing Islamist quest to effectively perpetrate yet another Holocaust.

Thus, while Obama weakens America and disparages Western values and the tenets of Judeo-Christian civilization, he always chooses to suppress the reality of Islamic triumphalism and its appalling and inhumane history of slavery, hatred of non-Muslims, brutal Muslim conquests, and slaughter dating back to its 7th-century origins in Arabia.

This is why no one should be surprised that he would bow to a Saudi king and venerate the Islamic call of the muezzin.

Given his background, it is no wonder that Obama fell for the monumental lie that the Jewish state is also a modern colonizer, just as the European powers were.  After all, Obama’s other confidants included, as the principled and worthy Victor David Hanson recently pointed out, “the obscene Reverend Wright and reprobates like Bill Ayers and Father Michael Pfleger.”

But unlike the European colonizers who had no ancestral roots in the Middle Eastern territories they occupied, Israel is the biblical and post-biblical homeland of the Jewish people, and as the native people of its ancestral homeland, the Jews predate the Muslim invasion of Israel by millennia, as is clearly evident in the Bible, which could not have been written when and where it was otherwise.

Even though sovereignty was lost to them after the Roman destruction of the Jewish state, Jews have always lived in their native land in whatever numbers they could sustain under a succession of alien occupiers.

Despite these clearly established historical facts, modern reborn Israel and her democratically elected leader, Prime Minister Netanyahu, have been treated with unprecedented contempt by Obama and his sycophants.

This was evident early on with Obama’s support of and friendship to the Islamist Erdoğan in Turkey, who has reduced once secular Turkey to a growing totalitarian Islamic state that has openly supported terrorism against Israel, as demonstrated by the Gaza flotilla incident of 2010.

Erdoğan’s perfidy – which has included all but open support for ISIS – has in no way dampened Obama’s preferential treatment of this dictator, in contrast to his appalling treatment of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Routinely, the State Department promotes the hypocrisy of the Obama administration by ignoring the aggression and terror of the Palestinian Authority, led by the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas and Islamic Jihad thugs who rule over the Gaza Strip.

In deplorable contrast, the State Department routinely attacks Israel for building homes in Jerusalem for young couples, or chiding Israel to exercise “restraint” when Israel is forced to defend itself from relentless Palestinian brutality and murder of Israeli civilians.  Was France or Belgium similarly asked to exercise “restraint” in the face of recent Muslim terrorist attacks in those countries?

This spitefulness was exhibited when the U.S., at the behest of a high-level individual in the Obama administration (wonder who!), denied visas to Israelis during Israel’s defensive Gaza war in 2014 against Hamas aggression.

Even as the barrage of thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli villages and towns from Gaza continued, this outrage was compounded when President Obama banned the much needed resupply of armaments to Israel at the height of the Hamas terror blitz and temporarily banned U.S. airlines from flying to Israel on the flimsiest of pretexts (23 international carriers – including British Airways – continued flights to Israel in spite of this ban).

Obama has also treated America’s other traditional allies with insolent disdain and cozied up to the worst enemy of freedom and liberty – namely, the Islamo-Nazi regime of Iran.

Iran’s ongoing implicit threats of nuclear warfare – against the U.S. as well as Israel – including its aggressive development of potentially nuclear-armed ICBMs, which can eventually reach the U.S., does not faze this incumbent in the White House.

The fact that this supposed nuclear “agreement” with Iran was reached, even as his very own State Department admits that Iran has yet to actually sign the agreement and even as Iranian mobs continue to chant “Death to America” to the approving nods of the Iranian mullahs, also fits into Barack Hussein Obama’s distorted world view – a deliberate policy of lies, deception, and dissimilitude.

This was admitted to by one of his closest advisers, Ben Rhodes, who recently disclosed that the Obama administration had deliberately deceived Congress and the American public about the Iran deal – as if this was something to be proud of.

Perhaps one of the most blatant examples of Obama’s anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israeli ideology was his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his reluctance to sell arms to President El-Sisi, who overthrew the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and his vicious anti-Christian regime after it had been in power for only two years and had wrought havoc on that country.

Obama’s support for Morsi should have come as no surprise, given the endless flow of Muslim Brotherhood activists visiting Obama’s White House and the filling of senior positions within the administration, as documented by former CIA analyst Clare Lopez.

Even today, El-Sisi fights al-Qaeda terrorism in the Sinai and the Hamas terrorists in Gaza without any apparent support or approval from Obama.

These examples of the president’s bias, his pro-Islamic sympathies, and his agenda point to a seminal hatred of not only America itself, but most pointedly of the Jewish state – this hatred may override all other practical considerations in the remaining few months of his term in office.

His parting shot at Israel may well be to force her expulsion from the United Nations and turn the Jewish state into another Taiwan.

As suggested at the beginning of this article, he might well encourage both Iranian terror proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezb’allah in Lebanon, to attack Israel with a massive missile bombardment sometime this coming December.

Hamas, for its own part, has thousands of lethal rockets and mortars and is feverishly building tunnels into Israeli territory in the hope of sending its terrorist hordes into Israeli villages and towns and slaughtering as many civilians as possible.  Hezb’allah, on the other hand, is estimated to have more than 150 thousand missiles and rockets aimed at all of Israel, hidden in Lebanese schools, hospitals, and apartments.

Even as the deliberate use of civilians as human shields is explicitly spelled out by the Geneva Conventions as a crime against humanity, and though Israel would have no choice but to inflict substantial civilian casualties in her own defense, this circumstance would naturally be used as a pretext by the U.N. to punish Israel in an unprecedented manner.

They would do so knowing that for the first time, an American president would likely stand by and approve whatever the U.N. anti-Israel “lynch mob” might concoct in order to further isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.  This might include severe economic sanctions or embargoes or might even involve expulsion of Israel from the U.N. entirely.

It should be emphasized here that once the American national election is over, there will be nothing to stop Obama from doing this.  Obama’s entire foreign policy has revolved around undermining Israel.  Such an action on his part in the closing weeks of his administration can be seen as not only possible, but likely, given the pattern of his behavior toward Israel for the whole of his presidency.

This latter punishment would suit Israel’s enemies very well, even though it would change nothing on the ground.  An Israel reduced to a Taiwan-like status – i.e., a de facto sovereign state not officially recognized as such by the U.N. – would obviate the need for Gulf Arabs (who are covertly making common cause with Israel against Iran) to establish any formal diplomatic relations with her.

The “Zionist entity,” as their official propaganda impudently puts it, would remain just that.  This might even, in rhetorical terms, satisfy the requirement of Iran’s mullahs to “wipe Israel from the map.”  What is more, once Israel is expelled from the U.N., it would be very difficult for any future U.S. president, no matter how pro-Israel, to successfully support Israel’s re-admittance into the U.N.

As is the case with Taiwan, the U.S. may maintain a commitment to supplying Israel with arms and supporting her efforts at self-defense, but in practical terms, that may be the extent of the relationship, even in the best-case scenario surrounding Israel’s expulsion from the U.N. under Obama during his final days in office.

While such a turn of events may sound far-fetched to even some of those most critical of Obama, it is entirely possible in view of Obama’s past acts of blatant hatred toward America’s one and only true ally and democracy in the Middle East.

 

Categories: Erdogan, Foreign policy, Hamas, Iran and Israel, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Israel, Israeli security, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama and Israel, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Turkey, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Cleric Highlights US Enmity towards Islam, Iran

May 13, 2016

Cleric Highlights US Enmity towards Islam, Iran, Tasnim News Agency, May 13, 2016

(Wouldn’t that be grand! — DM)

Iranian cleric

TEHRAN (Tasnim) A top Iranian cleric emphasized that the US remains to be the archenemy of Islam, Iran and Shiism.

“The US is the toughest enemy of Islam and Muslims, and provides financial and military support for those following that path (countering Islam),” Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani said in an address to a gathering of worshippers in Tehran on Friday.

An obvious sign of US hostility towards Muslims is Washington’s full support for Israel, the cleric explained.

Highlighting Washington’s opposition to “an Islamic Iran”, Ayatollah Movahedi Kermani said the US seeks to foment Islamophobia and Iranophobia by attributing acts of terrorism to Islam.

“The US is arrogant and bully, (because) it allows itself to have nuclear weapons, but forbids the other countries to possess even conventional defensive weapons,” the cleric noted.

In comments earlier this month, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei also slammed the US government for its continued hostilities toward Muslims and the Islamic Republic of Iran, saying that Washington is seeking to tarnish the image of Islam, and spread Iranophobia and Shiaphobia.

“Today, Islamophobia, Iranophobia and Shiaphobia, are among the definite policies of the US and its puppet regimes,” the Leader said, adding, “Today, corrupt (terrorist) groups that are committing heinous crimes in the name of Islam are supported by Western powers.”

Imam Khamenei also described the vigilance of Muslim nations, Iranians in particular, against the hegemonic powers’ corrupt acts as the main reason behind such hostilities, saying this is the reason why Iran is threatened to be boycotted when it opposes the US policies in the Middle East.

Categories: Iranian media, Iranophobia, Islamophobia, Obama and Iran, Obama and Islam, Obama's America
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »