Iran

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Mon May 30, 2022 2:17 pm

Iran: Coast Guard Seizes Two Greek Oil Tankers in Retaliation

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Iran has just seized two Greece-owned and flagged tankers in the Persian Gulf in retaliation, following reports that the U.S had seized an Iran oil tanker and transferred the oil to another vessel in Greece. | Photo: Twitter @_AfricanSoil

Published 28 May 2022

Tehran adopted punitive measures against Greece this Friday after this country, along with the United States, seized an Iranian oil tanker, Iranian media reported.

Iranian media reported Friday that Iran's Coast Guard has seized two Greek oil tankers, the Delta Poseidon, and the Prudent Warrior, off the coast of Aslaviyeh and Bandar Lengeh, just two days after Greece seized an Iranian oil tanker in compliance with U.S. pressure.

Iranian media outlets had said that Tehran has made the decision to take punitive measures against Greece on account of the latter's seizing of an Iranian oil tanker close to its coasts. The IRGC announced the seizure of the ships because they were in violation of maritime navigation rules.


Greece's Foreign Minister announced its protest of Iran's seizure of the two ships sailing under Greek flags in the Gulf. The Iranian media said that the two Greek-flagged Delta Poseidon and Prudent Warrior were seized by a force of the IRGC that conducted a Heliborne drop on the oil tankers, and were escorted to the Iranian coast.

Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned the head of Greece's diplomatic mission for seizing cargo from a vessel flying the Iranian flag in Greek waters.


The head of the Mediterranean and East European affairs at Iran's Foreign Ministry stated that Greece's “unacceptable” surrender to illegal U.S. pressures was “an example of international piracy,” as was the “seizure of the cargo of the ship” flying the flag of Iran.

The official also stated that Iran “will not relinquish its legal rights and expects the Greek government to honor its international commitments in the maritime and shipping sectors.”

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ira ... -0003.html

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The Return of the “Oil Tanker War” with Messages Affecting the Nuclear File
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 29, 2022
Elijah J. Magnier

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After two years of a fragile lull, the “Oil Tanker War” has reappeared in the international arena. Iran has confronted the US through its European ally, Greece, which has been pushed against Tehran. However, the confrontation this time is different as the Iranian message is not limited to the seizure of one or two tankers, but is also a response to the nuclear issue, raising the tension level to a higher point in which things may escalate more than they appear if the US exacerbates.

On April 19, Greece seized the Russian tanker “Pegas” on the island of Euboea, changed its name to “Aframax Lana,” coinciding with the Iranian announcement that the ship belongs to the “Islamic Republic of Iran” despite remaining under the Russian flag. According to what the Greek authorities announced, the tanker, carrying 115,000 tons of Iranian oil, was seized at the request of the US. Its oil was transferred to another Liberia-flagged ship to be delivered to US ports in the act not unlike international piracy.

Iran considered this act a violation of international law. In fact, no judicial authority has the right to confiscate the cargo of an oil tanker and deliver it to another country under any pretext or political pressure, even from a superpower like the US. These acts indicate once again the tendency of powerful nations to no longer respect international law.

The Iranian response was not long in coming: the Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized two Greek tankers, “Delta Poseidon” (with a crew of 25 men) and “Prudent Warrior” (with a crew of 24 Greeks and Filipinos), which were loaded with Iraqi oil from Basra. This pushed oil prices to $119, increasing the global economic burden and disrupting the already turbulent markets due to Western sanctions against Russia and the thirst for gas and oil after the war in Ukraine.

The two Greek tankers were boarded by Iranian helicopters, embarked with Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces, and forced to anchor 11 miles off the Iranian coast. The selection of the two tankers was far from coincidental: the cargo of oil was to be delivered to the US. Iran accepted Washington’s challenge and showed no fear of turning against Greece and (especially) the US. It also indicates that Iran regards European nations as subject to the dictate of the US: the real battle is against Washington, not with any other European country.

This raises questions: The world is familiar with Iran’s powerful method when, in July 2019, the British-flagged tanker “Stena Impero” was stopped after Britain intercepted an Iranian tanker off the coast of Gibraltar. So the question is: what is behind the mutual piracy of tankers?

The negotiations related to the nuclear issue have ended in Vienna. There is nothing more to discuss, except the US political decision to remove the name and institutions of the IRGC from the terrorism list. This is what the US resists enforcing (not quickly), as some of its officials have leaked to the media that Iran cannot impose conditions that are not related to the nuclear discussion. The US believes that the IRGC should not be removed from the terrorism list because of its growing capability and support for Iran’s allies, which is incompatible with US and Israeli interests. The US pretends to ignore that the IRGC represents the state and that most of its civilian and military institutions are run by its leadership.

This US leak was followed by a statement by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who confirmed that his country would be tough on any “illegal smuggling” of Iranian oil. In addition, the US imposed sanctions on Russia and Iran, which it accused of collaborating to “smuggle and sell oil.”

So there is little room here for coincidence with what is going on, and the exchange of “messages” between the US and Iran is not about tankers and oil, but mainly about the nuclear issue.

The U.S. understands that it must release all of Iran’s frozen funds and loosen Iran’s hands by exporting millions of barrels of oil daily (due to thirsty markets and a desire to reduce the price of oil for its domestic needs). Such a move will return billions of dollars to Iran, which will be even more generous to its allies, who have begun to pose a real existential threat to Israel and US influence in the Middle East.

In fact, if no nuclear deal is reached to stop Iran’s nuclear development, the “Islamic Republic” will extend to the level of the club of full-capacity nuclear states. Consequently, it will no longer be possible to threaten Iran, and the Middle East will enter a nuclear race that will remove the U.S. from its hegemony over many countries.

However, Iran believes that the U.S. keeps the IRGC under sanctions so that it can impose more restrictions under different headings. Iran does not want to lose its nuclear and scientific progress only in exchange for oil or material concessions or the lifting of sanctions that the current or future untrustworthy U.S. administration could reinstate. Since the victory of the revolution in 1979, U.S. sanctions have not impeded Iran’s progress or the development of its allies’ capabilities. Therefore, the country will not accept the tattered deal unless it fits its own terms.

Iran announced that 17 Greek ships sailing in its waters and in the Persian Gulf could be seized if Greece continued to follow U.S. policy. But this message was not directed to Greece, but first of all to the US and the rest of the world. It says that no nation will be able to get oil that ships from the Middle East (19% of the world’s needs) if Iran cannot sell its oil and if the US continues Iranian oil piracy.

The world is paying the price of the maximum sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russia, Iran, and Venezuela raising food prices to an unprecedented level. All three countries are major energy producers and the US has forced the West to make highly costly energy decisions, damaging the interests of Europe (and the World).

With the tanker wars, the U.S. pressured a European country to confront Iran, believing that Tehran would hesitate to oppose Greece, part of the European Community and a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. Moreover, the US might also have thought that separating Russia from Europe was a successful step that could be copied and pasted with Iran to deprive Europe of other trading partners and limit the EU’s choices to the US.

Since the bombing of the US military air base at Ain Al-Assad in Iraq in 2020, Iran is determined to impose deterrence on all its enemies with confrontation, without resorting to its allies. Iran believes that it is living in a world ruled by the “law of the jungle” and must fight for its survival without any flexibility. This led Iran to bomb the Mossad base in Iraqi Kurdistan and announce its responsibility for the attack. The previous wars with tankers in the Strait of Hormuz show that Iran will respond to any attack that endangers its sovereignty.

What is happening is not much different from protecting US hegemony and unilateralism around the world, which many countries have begun to reject, confront and challenge. This coming summer is expected to become hotter than today due to the last few months of ‘bras-de-fer’ before the inevitable final signing of the nuclear deal.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... lear-file/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 02, 2022 2:04 pm

Iran Suggests the Shanghai Pact to Create a Single Currency

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President Raisi: Iran's membership in Shanghai Pact provides a good platform for regional development. | Photo: Twitter @Iran_GOV

Published 2 June 2022 (1 hours 58 minutes ago)

Iran is proposing to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to create a single currency for financial-trade exchanges between member countries.

Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister for Economic Diplomacy Mehdi Safari said on Wednesday, while talking to a TV reporter, that Iran has sent an official letter to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) proposing “the creation of a single currency” to boost economic relations among its member countries.

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According to the Iranian official, the creation of a single currency among SCO members will facilitate financial exchange in the bloc, especially with economically powerful countries such as China, India, and Russia.

Safari said that Iran's proposal will be taken up at the next SCO summit, to be held in September in Uzbekistan, indicating that he hopes this offer will come to fruition.


Regarding Iran's membership in the SCO, approved last September, the Iranian deputy foreign minister made it clear that the country is trying to speed up the process of joining this alliance in order to fully benefit from interaction with members in various fields, especially the economic one.

The SCO is a very important multilateral organization because its member states cover more than one third of the world's population, and its backbone has been built by two large countries in the political and economic sectors: China and Russia.


In fact, as of September 17, Iran became the ninth member country of the economy-oriented regional mechanism, while it had been an observer country in the organization since 2005.

In addition to China, Russia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the SCO is made up of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and India.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ira ... -0004.html

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THE SANCTIONED: HOW IRAN AND RUSSIA ARE SETTING NEW RULES
pepe escobar

Jun 1, 2022 , 7:21 a.m.

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Iran and Russia are taking the lead in establishing alternative financial networks to circumvent Western sanctions (Photo: The Cradle)

The first Eurasian Economic Forum , held last week in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, should be remembered as a milestone in setting parameters for the geo-economic integration of the Eurasian core.

Sergei Glazyev, the Minister in charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of Russia's Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), is coordinating the push to devise an alternative monetary-financial system, a de facto post-Bretton Woods III, in cooperation with China. .

According to Glazyev, the forum "discussed the model of a new global payment currency linked to baskets of national currencies and raw materials. The introduction of this monetary instrument in Eurasia will imply the collapse of the dollar system and the definitive undermining of American political and military power." It is necessary to start negotiations on the signing of an appropriate international treaty within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)."

Glazyev described the initiative to capsize the Western global financial system in greater detail in an exclusive interview with The Cradle in April.

It is particularly relevant to understand how Glazyev interconnects the progress of the UEE with the growing geopolitical and geoeconomic role of the SCO, which brings together important Eurasian powers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Iran.

That connects directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who during the meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council supported the extension of a temporary free trade agreement between the EUA and Iran, which is the latest full member (Asia's only Western) of the SCO. Putin said this must happen despite "the confrontation with the West as a whole."

The UEE, inaugurated in 2015 with five full members - Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia - represents a market of 184 million people and a combined GDP of more than 5 billion dollars. The next step with Iran will be to implement a comprehensive free trade agreement, possibly before the end of the year, according to Iranian Trade Minister Alireza Peymanpak. Egypt, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also candidates for dealings with the UEE.

Iran, which has been forced for four decades to find creative solutions to circumvent serial imperial sanctions packages, may have a conceptual lesson or two to teach Russia. Barter deals are gaining ground: Tehran is offering spare parts and gas turbines to Moscow's power plants in exchange for much-needed zinc, aluminium, lead and steel for its metal and mining industries, according to the foreign minister. Iranian Commerce and Industries, Reza Fatemi Amin.

And more bartering is coming across a wide range of commodities, as was discussed during a recent visit by Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak to Tehran.

THE OTHER "RIC"

Slowly but surely, the new RIC (Russia-Iran-China), rather than the old RIC of BRICS (Russia-India-China), is trying to integrate their financial systems. Iran is a matter of national security strategy for China, as an energy supplier and key partner of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in West Asia.

Russia and China, however, is a much more complex issue. Extremely concerned about provoking US sanctions, Chinese banks are refraining - at least for now - from increasing their deals with Russian banks, which brings up the case of UnionPay:

The Chinese bank card provider - increasingly popular, especially across Asia - declined a partnership with Sberbank even before Russia's largest bank was banned by the European Union (EU) and the United States from the global messaging platform. SWIFT banking. UnionPay has also canceled plans with other Russian banks to issue its cards linked to the Russian Mir payment system, which could benefit from Visa and Mastecard exiting the Russian market.

This is still a balancing act by China. At the beginning of the year at the Boao Forum in Asia, President Xi Jinping was categorical in rejecting the "gratuitous use of unilateral sanctions". And more than 80% of the Chinese companies already established in Russia seem to be continuing their business as usual.

However, in practical terms, there are serious problems. The Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (BICC) have restricted the financing of Russian raw materials. Even the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), absolutely essential for sustainable development projects, connected or not to the IFR, decided to freeze all loans to Russia and Belarus in early March to "safeguard" its "financial integrity".


On the financial front, cautious Chinese banks, with huge Western exposure, are always reconciling the fact that some 80% of global cross-border transactions are still in dollars and euros, and only 2% in yuan. So the Russian market is not exactly a priority.

In parallel, the Russian-Iranian front is quite dynamic. They are overloading mutual settlements in their national currencies at the "highest possible level", as Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak highlighted: "We discussed together with the central banks the spread and operation of the financial messaging system, as well as the connection of the Mir and Shetab [Iranian] payment cards".

Currently, the Mir card is not yet accepted in Iran, but that is about to change, as well as in Turkey, which this summer will start accepting Mir card payments by legions of Russian tourists. What this means in practice is that Russia and Iran will connect their banks to the Financial Message Transfer System (STMF), the Russian equivalent of SWIFT. The Chinese will obviously study how the transition works smoothly.

Now, compare all of the above with the prospect that soon there will be no SWIFT at all, as Mastercard CEO Micharl Miebach blurted out in Davos .

Miebach was participating in a panel on the Central Bank of Digital Currencies, discussing cross-border payments, when he suggested that SWIFT would soon be a thing of the past. Without a doubt: Moscow is already eyeing digital currencies and crypto, and Beijing is hell-bent on putting the digital yuan to work around SWIFT and its linked CHIPS. Coordination).

THE SANCTIONED ONES, NOW MOVING FAST

The Russian-Iranian front has developed rapidly since January this year, when Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, on a visit to Moscow, handed over a draft agreement to Putin on strategic cooperation for the next 20 years, building on "the very good experience of cooperation between Iran and Russia in Syria combating terrorism", and expanding into "the spheres of economy, politics, culture, science, technology, military defense, as well as security and space affairs" .

Raisi also explicitly thanked Putin "for facilitating Tehran's entry into the SCO."

Iranian Oil Minister Javad Ouji got straight to the point in his meeting with Novak in Tehran last week: "Our countries are under strict sanctions, and we have the potential to neutralize them through the development of bilateral relations... We have created joint committees around banking, energy, transport and agriculture issues, as well as the issue of creating nuclear plants".

And this brings us once again to the seemingly eternal soap opera of the Vienna-based Joint Comprehensive Action Plan (JCPOA) talks, with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov now noting that the final draft "is in a high degree of predisposition for its adoption. There are some political problems, which are not related to the finalization of the text".

Removing the proverbial US fog of confusion, Ryabkov stated how "in terms of our interests, even in the context of peaceful nuclear cooperation with Iran, the text is quite satisfactory...there is nothing to 'fine tune'." So when the Americans say the deal is "unattainable," Ryabkov added, it means they are "passing on the results of their internal discussions."

The point is that, on the JCPOA, Tehran and Moscow are in sync: "We are what they call anxious, and it could happen very quickly if the political decision is made."

Expanding on its synchronicity, Tehran even proposed to organize negotiations between Moscow and kyiv on the conflict in Ukraine, following the Turkish example. However, for now, after the failure of Ankara, it is clear that the decision-makers in Washington do not want to negotiate, but rather an endless war to the last Ukrainian.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian remains in sync with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov. In Davos, he said that the Ukrainian drama was caused by "the provocative actions of the United States and NATO"; they "provoked the Kremlin to do this." That is what Beijing has been quietly hinting at.

All of the above shows some of the trials and tribulations of Eurasian integration, and the long and winding road to a new USE-SCO system. But first things first: there needs to be some kind of action on the Mir and UnionPay front. When that news is given, the die will be cast.

https://misionverdad.com/traducciones/l ... vas-reglas

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 19, 2022 2:30 pm

Chris Hedges: War with Iran
by EDITOR
July 15, 2022

The United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel, responsible for military fiascos, hundreds of thousands of deaths and innumerable war crimes in the Middle East, are now plotting to attack Iran.

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Illustration by Mr. Fish — “Biden at Bat”

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.

During his visit to Israel, Biden assured Prime Minister Yair Lapid that the U.S. is “prepared to use all elements of its national power,” including military force, to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.

Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. function as a troika in the Middle East. The Israeli government has built a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks and has been a prolific sponsor of international terrorism, supporting Salafi jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and such groups as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.

The three countries worked in tandem to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew its first democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated and impoverished places on earth.

Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. In January 2020, the United States assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper to fire missiles into his convoy, near Baghdad’s airport.

If similar attacks had been carried out by Iranian operatives inside Israel, it would have triggered a war. Only Iran’s decision not to retaliate, beyond lobbing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq, prevented a conflagration.

On July 7, Iran informed The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it is using IR-6 centrifuges with “modified subheaders.” The declared purpose of the enrichment process at its underground facility at Fordow is to create uranium isotope enriched up to 20 percent—far below the 90 percent enrichment levels necessary to create weapons-grade uranium. Under the JCPOA agreement, enrichment levels were capped at 3.67 percent.

Israel has allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran and, during the first week of June, held large-scale military exercises, including one over the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea, in preparation to attack Iranian nuclear sites using dozens of fighter aircraft, including Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets.

The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama provides a 10-year, $38 billion military package for Israel.

Israel and its lobby in the U.S. are working to scuttle negotiations with Iran to monitor its nuclear program. The preparation for war mirrors the Israeli pressure on the U.S. to invade Iraq, one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in testimony before the British Iraq war commission, offered this account of his discussions with George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Saudi Arabia, which seeks to dominate the Arab world, severed ties with Iran in 2016 after its embassy in Tehran was stormed by protesters following Riyadh’s execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Saudi Arabia, with Chinese help, has built a plant to process uranium ore and acquired ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia signed a series of letters in 2017 with the U.S. to purchase weapons totaling $110 billion immediately, and $ 350 billion over the next decade.

Awar with Iran would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It would spread swiftly throughout the region. The Shiites across the Middle East would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The two million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province; the Shiite majority in Iraq; and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would join the fight against the U.S. and Israel.

Iran would use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, rocket and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, mines, drones and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified gas supply. Oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf would be sabotaged. Iranian oil, which makes up 13 percent of the world’s energy supply, would be taken off the market. Oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict drags on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy, already reeling under rising prices because of the sanctions on Russia, would grind to a halt.

Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah’s store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona, would also be deployed. Strikes by Iran and its allies on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, dead.

In 2002, the U.S. military conducted its “most elaborate war game” ever, costing over $ 250 million. Known as the Millennium Challenge, the exercise was between a Blue Force (the U.S.) and the Red Force (widely considered as a stand-in for Iran). It was meant to validate America’s “modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts.” It did the opposite. The Red Force, led by retired Marine lieutenant general Paul Van Riper, conducted a swarm of kamikaze suicide boat attacks and destroyed 16 U.S. warships in under 20 minutes.

When the war game was reset, it was rigged in favor of the Blue Force. The Blue Force was given access to experimental technology – including that which doesn’t exist such as airborne laser weapons. Meanwhile, the Red Force was told they weren’t allowed to shoot down the Blue Team’s aircraft, had to keep their offensive weapons in the open and could not use chemical weapons. Even then, the Blue Force could not achieve all of its objectives as Riper unleashed a guerrilla insurgency on the occupying forces.

Why shouldn’t Joe Biden be feted by the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia and the apartheid state of Israel? He and the U.S. have as much blood on their hands as they do. Yes, in 2018 the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, Israel assassinated Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. But Washington has more than matched the crimes carried out by Israel and the Saudis, including against journalists.

The imprisonment of Julian Assange – who released the collateral murder videoshowing U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot to death two Reuters journalists and a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007 – is designed to destroy Assange psychologically and physically. The corpses of civilians, including children, piled up by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who do much of their killing in Gaza and Yemen with U.S. weapons, don’t come close to the hundreds of thousands of dead we have left behind in the two decades of warfare we have perpetrated in the Middle East.

In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities resulting in sewage contaminating the country’s drinking water. Then followed years of U.S., U.K. and French airstrikes enforcing a “No Fly Zone” along with crushing sanctions they imposed via the U.N. From 1991 to 1998, these sanctions alone were estimated to have killed 100,000 to 227,000 Iraqi children under the age of five, although the exact figures have been the subject of much dispute. The U.S. “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers during its subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 dropped 3,000 bombs on civilian areas, killing over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war.

By one estimate, the U.S. has been responsible for directly or indirectly killing nearly 20 million people since the end of the Second World War.

Israel and Saudi Arabia are gangster states. But so is the United States.

“There are few of them,” Biden, reacting to Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend and I make no apologies.”

The angst about Biden’s not holding the Saudis and the Israelis to account on this visit is risible, as if we have any credibility left that allows us to arbitrate between right and wrong. The idea that Biden and the U.S. are brokers for peace was eviscerated long ago. The U.S. offers shameless support for Israel’s right-wing government, including vetoing U.N. resolutions that censor Israel. It refuses to condition aid on a respect for human rights even as Israel launches repeated murderous assaults against the civilian population in Gaza, labels Palestinian NGOs as terror groups, expands illegal Jewish-only settlements, carries out aggressive housing evictions of Palestinian families and mistreats Palestinian and Arab-American citizens at points of entry and within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The idea that we represent and promote virtue illustrates the self-delusion that accompanies our moral and physical degeneration. The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at whom we have become, does not take us seriously. They fear our bombs. But fear is not respect. They no longer envy our hedonistic mass culture, tarnished by mass shootings, social inequality, the decay of our infrastructure, dysfunction and a Grand Guignol-style of politics that has turned civil and political discourse into a tawdry burlesque. America is a grim joke, one about to be made worse when the Christian fascists, bigots and conspiracy theorists take control of the Congress in the fall, and I expect, the presidency two years later.

The U.S., along with Israel, makes war on Muslims who, with an estimated 1.9 billion adherents, comprise nearly 25 percent of the world population. We have turned many in the Muslim world into our enemies. The Muslim world does not hate us for our values. It hates our hypocrisy. It hates our racism, our refusal to honor their political aspirations, our lethal attacks and military occupations and our crippling sanctions. Muslims express the rage felt by Guatemalans, Cubans, Congolese, Brazilians, Argentines, Indonesians, Panamanians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, North and South Koreans, Chileans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans – those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” They too were slaughtered by our high-tech military machine and subjugated, humiliated, forced to accept U.S. hegemony and killed in our clandestine torture centers or by CIA-backed assassins.

No one is held accountable. The CIA blocked all investigations into its torture program, including destroying videotape evidence of interrogations involving torture and classifying nearly all of the 6,900-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that examined the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture and other abuse of detainees.

Biden goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel as a supplicant. As a presidential candidate, he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and vowed to make it “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s murder. But with the rising price of oil, Biden is whitewashing the murder, along with the humanitarian disaster the Saudis have caused in Yemen, imploring the Saudis to increase output, a plea Prince Salman has rejected. Similarly, Biden is weak in Israel, powerless against the expansion of Jewish settlements and assaults on Palestinians, and unwilling to move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, a move by the Trump administration that violates international law. Biden’s staff was reduced to pleading with the Israelis not to embarrass him as they did during his 2010 visit as vice president. During his 2010 visit, Israel announced it was building 1,600 new Jewish-only houses in illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. The Obama White House angrily condemned “the substance and timing of the announcement.”

How can the U.S. bar Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from a summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and embrace the Saudi regime and the Israeli aparatheid state? How can it decry the war crimes of Russia and unleash industrial violence on the Mulism world? How can it plead for the 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, and ignore the Palestinians? How can it justify another “preemptive war,” this time against Iran? The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. They know who we are. They know that in our eyes they are unworthy. Our inevitable demise on the world stage is cheered by the majority of the planet. The tragedy is that, as we go down, we are determined to take so many others down with us.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/15/hedges-war-with-iran/

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Iran and Russia Will Drop the Dollar in Bilateral Trade-Peskov

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Dmitry Peskov said the volume of trade exchanges between Russia and Iran has seen a 31 percent growth in the first quarter of the current year. Jul. 18, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@Safarnejad_IR

Published 18 July 2022 (12 hours 12 minutes ago)

According to the Kremlin spokesman, Iran and Russia will move away from the dollar in their bilateral trade.

"Last year, trade and economic relations between the two countries exceeded $4 billion. Although, it may be a mistake to count them in U.S. dollars. Over time, we will probably move away from this practice as we develop our interaction in the banking and financial spheres," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

In an interview with the Foreign Service of the Iranian Broadcasting Organization (IRIB), the spokesman viewed as positive the 31 percent increase in the volume of trade between the two countries in the first quarter of the current year.

According to Peskov, Russia and Iran could soon reach a long-term comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement to boost their ties and help ease the impact of Western sanctions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov handed over the draft comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement to the Iranian authorities during his June visit to Tehran, Peskov said, noting that Russia is set to sign it once Iran introduces its amendments.


On the sanctions imposed by the West against both nations, the Russian diplomat said, "This is probably the price that both our country and Iran are paying for their independence and for their sovereignty."

Peskov also referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Iran, scheduled for next Tuesday. The Russian diplomat will attend a trilateral meeting with Iranian President Seyed Ebrahim Raisi and Türkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Under tough Western sanctions, Russia and Iran have long voiced their resolve to deepen bilateral economic cooperation. The two countries have effectively moved away from the dollar and switched to their national currencies.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ira ... -0023.html

The inevitable result of dealing out sanctions like grapeshot: There are so many 'sanctioned' that they can get by without your trade or your dollar. The unbalanced blowback, the US gets some pain but the EU gets lots of pain bodes ill for the long term survival of NATO. Good.

The rolling disaster this tactic has spawned will be considered a classic "FUBAR' in the history books of the future.
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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 23, 2022 3:00 pm

CIA Director: Iran Has Never Resumed Its Nuclear Program

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The director of the CIA said that Iran has never resumed its nuclear program since 2004. July 20, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@william_jengu

Published 20 July 2022

On Wednesday, the CIA said that Iran has never resumed the nuclear program dropped in 2004.

According to Wednesday's statements of the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, Tehran has never resumed the nuclear weapons program; on the other hand Washington has claimed for four years that they had secretly continued it.

"Our best intelligence judgment is that the Iranians have not resumed the weaponization effort that they had underway up until 2004 and then suspended, so that's something; obviously, we at CIA and across the US intelligence community keep a very, very sharp focus on," said the CIA Director during the Aspen Security Forum celebrated in Colorado.

Reports have indicated that Burns explained the same last December at the Wall Street Journal's annual CEO Council even though the Biden administration and several top U.S. officials couldn't help to continue saying that Iran has been nearing a "breakout," which would mean that it would be capable of producing a nuclear bomb in weeks.

Israeli authorities consider that claims go back even further. On the other hand, last fall, the Israeli military intelligence director Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman commented to Israel's Walla News: "to the best of our knowledge, the directive has not changed, and they are not heading toward a breakout. They are not heading toward a bomb right now: It may be in the distant future."


"There is an enriched amount [of uranium] in volumes that we have not seen before, and it is disturbing," said Hayman. "At the same time, in all other aspects of the Iranian nuclear project, we see no progress - not in the weapons project, in the financial area, not in any other sector."

The U.S. administration unilaterally pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with the Iranian government back to 2018, accusing Tehran of secretly having resumed its weapons program. As a result, Washington imposed "maximum pressure" economic sanctions on the southwest Asian nation.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/CIA ... -0023.html

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Iran Helps Venezuela’s PDVSA to Increase Production, Says Reuters
JULY 19, 2022

Image
The flags of Iran and Venezuela, when Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro arrived at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, Iran June 10, 2022. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency)

Iran will be increasing the supply of a key type of crude oil to Venezuela, with the aim of boosting the productivity of Venezuelan refineries, and thus freeing up its oil for exports.

According to a report issued by the British news agency Reuters, published this Tuesday, July 19, both nations in recent years have strengthened their energy cooperation, thus promoting the exchange of Iranian gasoline for Venezuelan heavy oil and other basic products.

Iran will also be collaborating with Venezuela in terms of technical assistance and the supply of refinery parts. This exchange has grown, particularly since May 2022, after the two countries, illegally sanctioned by the United States, signed a contract to refurbish Venezuela’s El Palito refinery.

According to Reuters, state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) will receive four million barrels of Iranian heavy crude in July alone. This represents a significant increase from the 1.07 million barrels imported in the month of June.

The shipments are expected to arrive at Venezuelan ports later this month, aboard the Iranian supertankers Herby and Serena. PDVSA’s objective would be to refine Iranian crude to increase the production of motor fuels. Similarly, the state company is trying to release its lighter grades (including Merey) to mix and export them.

The state company is currently importing approximately two million barrels per month of Iranian condensate, making it possible to boost the production of exportable mixtures.

https://orinocotribune.com/iran-helps-v ... s-reuters/

Hegemony slips away....
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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 25, 2022 4:08 pm

Biden’s words make war with Iran more likely

Joe Biden's chilling statements to an Israeli TV interviewer, including that he is prepared to use military force against Iran, present a grim outlook for reviving the Iran deal.
BY MITCHELL PLITNICK JULY 16, 2022 2

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SCREENSHOT FROM JOE BIDEN’S INTERVIEW WITH ISRAELI CHANNEL 12 NEWS ANCHOR YONIT LEVI

Joe Biden sat down for a wide-ranging interview with an Israeli television station. In it, there were two chilling statements regarding Iran. When asked if he was prepared to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal (or JCPOA) if the only way to close the deal was to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) he said, simply, “Yes.” And when asked if he was prepared to use military force against Iran, he responded, “As a last resort, yes.”

That was not good enough for Acting Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, but it was a very grim assessment of the chances of reaching a deal with Iran.


Lapid, speaking at a joint press conference with Biden in Jerusalem on Thursday, said “Words will not stop them, Mr. President. Diplomacy will not stop them. The only thing that will stop Iran is knowing that if they continue to develop their nuclear program, the free world will use force. The only way to stop them is to put a credible military threat on the table. It should not be a bluff, but the real thing. The Iranian regime must know that if they continue to deceive the world, they will pay a heavy price.”

Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu had much the same message for Biden. “We’ve been friends for 40 years,” he said, “but to ensure the next 40 years, we must deal with the Iranian threat. There must be a credible offensive military option. I told him the [JCPOA] deal is lousy. He knows my position… I told him that with no credible military option, Iran won’t be stopped. If Iran isn’t deterred, that military option has to be used.”

Biden continued to say that he preferred a diplomatic resolution. “I continue to believe that diplomacy is the best way to achieve this outcome,” he said. He would be well advised to remember that the events of the past seven years have proven that diplomacy does work, while belligerence produces exactly the opposite effect.

But Biden’s policies and his approach to the entire question of the Iran deal have not reflected any such understanding. While his administration has been engaging in discussions with Iran and the P5+1 (the group that negotiated the JCPOA in 2015, which consists of the U.S., UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany) from the beginning of his term, there was a distinct lack of urgency. As a result, the window of opportunity to strike a deal with the relatively friendly government of Hassan Rouhani slipped away.

The new hardline Iranian government of Ebrahim Raisi needed to show that they were holding a stronger line with the United States than their predecessors, but on the whole, their demands didn’t change much in the early days. They gradually advanced their defiance of the JCPOA, entirely in response to the United States abrogating it. But unlike the U.S. they never formally left the agreement, merely countered the sanctions and aggression by the United States by moving further with their nuclear work and reducing their cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

As time dragged on, Iran became increasingly reluctant to re-enter the JCPOA. Perhaps the greatest obstacle has been that Iran has no reason to believe that the U.S. would honor a deal struck by Biden should Republicans win back control of Congress in the midterms, or worse, the White House in 2024.

Still, the Raisi government continued the difficult, often strained, talks. Eventually, one proposal was that the Biden administration remove the IRGC from the State department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

In practice, removing the IRGC from the FTO would have virtually no impact. There are enough other sanctions in place to ensure that nothing would change with the removal, just as nothing changed when Trump put Iran on the list in 2019. But removing Iran creates significant problems politically, and this was the point of Trump’s move; to plant a “poison pill” for any future administrations that might want to negotiate with Iran.

Even for those U.S. officials who thought listing the IRGC was a mistake, it is an entirely different matter, politically, to remove them from the list. Such removal will be attacked, however disingenuously, both domestically and by U.S. Mideast allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, as another example of U.S. unreliability. And, given the very negative reputation the IRGC has, it will certainly be a criticism that hits the Biden administration hard.

Trump’s poison pill is working exactly as intended. The Biden administration sees Iran’s demand to de-list the IRGC as being disconnected from the nuclear issue. Iran correctly understands that the listing was done to prevent progress on the nuclear issue. Biden understands, correctly, that he will face intense backlash if he de-lists the IRGC, further complicating the already fraught politics around Iran.

Biden’s decision to reject de-listing the IRGC, though, is just one more step in what has been a bungled process from the beginning. Biden’s whole approach to the talks has been about Iran proving itself. This is foolhardy; even Trump’s own people acknowledged, when Trump broke the deal, that Iran had been in compliance.

Indeed, it was the U.S. that never fully complied with the deal, even under Obama. Part of the U.S. commitment was to encourage investment, and certainly to refrain from discouraging it, in Iran. Yet, from the moment the deal was struck, U.S. leaders discouraged investment in Iran, a direct violation of the agreement. Indeed, all a bank president or corporate CEO had to do was see the furious debate that lingered after the deal was struck to be put off from dealing with Iran, lest sanctions be put back in place, as they were.

Thanks to the abrogation of the JCPOA by Trump, Iran is closer to a nuclear device than it has ever been. That was inevitable, and the known consequence of leaving the deal. The inescapable conclusion is that the anti-Iran hawks, whether in Washington, Riyadh, or Jerusalem, want a war of regime change, not a viable, functional nuclear deal. Biden isn’t part of that group, but he has fallen almost deliberately into their traps and, with his declaration that he will go to war if diplomacy fails, he is furthering their cause.

It’s also important to note that, despite western rhetoric, it remains unclear that Iran actually wants a nuclear weapon. They had not been developing one since 2003, and even now, and have proceeded toward one only in response to the “maximum pressure” campaign that the Trump administration began and the Biden administration has continued without interruption or mitigation.

On Iran’s side, despite their efforts, they may not actually want a nuclear weapon, but rather the capacity to build one. So-called nuclear latent states are states that can produce a nuclear weapon in a relatively short time. Given that Iran’s two main adversaries—the United States and Israel—are both nuclear powers, it’s hard to argue that such a desire is irrational.

While Israel is pushing Biden toward war, the Saudis have been more reserved. Although they, too, bitterly opposed the JCPOA, they were less enthusiastic than Israel about Trump breaking it. Since April 2021, Iraq has been facilitating talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with an eye toward rapprochement between the two oil-producing adversaries. The process has been slow, but steady. While Riyadh would surely still like to see a widespread change in Iran, they would suffer far more than Israel or the U.S. in a war. They’re clearly not opposed to American and Israeli belligerence toward Iran, but they are not as enthusiastic about war, especially since they can’t be sure how much the U.S. and Israel would look after Saudi interests.

All of this leaves us right where Biden described it to Israel’s Channel 12. The U.S. is not going to take the steps it needs to for the JCPOA to advance, and Iran is very wary of re-entering the deal without some way to ensure the U.S. won’t break it again. Iran will not push for a war that would cost them enormously and that they would be unlikely to win. But they are also unwilling to accept American diktats and have every reason to want a deterrent against two nuclear-armed foes who both talk about attacks on the Islamic Republic.

A president with any courage, a clear-eyed assessment of global needs, and who would treat war in the Persian Gulf as a red line they would not want to cross could find the diplomatic solution Biden seems to prefer. But Biden fails on every count of being that president, as his Mideast trip conclusively proved. That means a grim outlook for reviving the Iran deal.

https://mondoweiss.net/2022/07/bidens-w ... re-likely/

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

Why is Biden joining the warpath against Iran?
The president signed an agreement saying it would use all elements of US power, including force, to stop Tehran from getting a bomb.

JULY 20, 2022
Written by Ted Snider

On March 24, President Biden drew a red line: if Russia uses chemical weapons in Ukraine, it “would trigger a response” from NATO. Asked to elaborate on the nature of the response, Biden had no script to guide him. “The nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use.” Then, he elaborated: “It would trigger a response in kind,” seemingly announcing that the US would respond to a Russian chemical weapons attack with a chemical weapons attack of their own.

Two days later, at the end of his speech, Biden seemed to call for a coup in Russia, adding the line, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House fixers had to walk back Biden’s threats. Biden has the dangerous habit for a president of going off script and saying things that don’t seem to reflect the U.S. policy he is supposed to be articulating.

On July 13, he seemed to do it again. Asked by an interviewer if the U.S. would use force to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Biden answered, “if that was the last resort, yes.”

But he hadn’t done it again. This time, the White House didn’t walk it back. They signed it. On July 14, the White House announced the signing of the “Joint Declaration on the US-Israel Strategic Partnership.” That declaration states not only the familiar U.S. commitment “never to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” but, as Biden had said, “that it is prepared to use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”

But why, in Biden’s words, would the U.S. “use force” against Iran? Why, in the words of the Joint Declaration, would it use “all elements of its national power?” There are several problems with the joint declaration’s commitment.

Not the least of which is the question of whether it is legal under international law. Would international law permit a pre-emptive war against a country that has not attacked or threatened to attack the US in order to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon? Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, told me that “a pre-emptive war against Iran because it seemed to be crossing or had crossed the nuclear threshold would be contrary to the substantive provisions of the UN Charter and international law.” He added, however, that the situation, like all situations, “is somewhat ambiguous because the P-5 members of the Security Council have a right of exception with respect to any and all non-procedural decisions by virtue of the veto.”

The second problem is that, despite popular conventional belief, it is not altogether clear that Iran is even pursuing a nuclear weapon.

According to Iran’s interpretation of Islamic law, nuclear weapons are haraam, forbidden by God. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, first and consistently laid down this ruling; his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has reiterated it. Khamenei has insisted that “from an ideological and fiqhi [Islamic jurisprudence] perspective, we consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful. We consider using such weapons as a big sin.” In 2003, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa that declared nuclear weapons to be forbidden by Islam. The late Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest-ranking clerics in Iran, said in 2003, “There is complete consensus on this issue. It is self- evident in Islam that it is prohibited to have nuclear bombs. It is eternal law, because the basic function of these weapons is to kill innocent people. This cannot be reversed.”

Though there has been disagreement over the scope of this law and how binding these declarations are in practice, it is consistent with Iran’s refusal to respond to Iraq’s chemical weapons attacks with chemical weapons of its own during the Iran-Iraq war because of the same ruling, as described by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But you don’t have to take Iran’s word for it. The 2007 and 2011 U.S. National Intelligence Estimates both concluded with “high confidence” that Iran was not building a bomb. In 2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta continued to say that Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon. Former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei told investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that “[d]uring my time at the agency, we haven’t seen a shred of evidence that Iran has been weaponizing”.

Though the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate added the line that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, in 2014’s Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, journalist Gareth Porter sifts through the claims for the existence of a weapons program prior to 2003 and argues that in each case, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “concluded that Iran’s statements…were ‘consistent with the agency’s findings.’” Porter reports that “the IAEA had to acknowledge in the end that it had found no evidence of Iranian weapons-related activity in any of the cases it investigated.” This led Porter to conclude that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapons program before 2003.

Meanwhile, Trita Parsi, author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute, told me that “there were elements in the Iranian program pre-2003 that [were] not compatible with a peaceful program, but to call that a weapons program is not accurate since Iran didn’t even have a stockpile of LEU [low enriched uranium] at the time.”

Of course, the book on Iran’s nuclear program has not yet been closed. In 2015, the IAEA indeed concluded that Iran had a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003, but it did not divert nuclear material from its civilian nuclear program as part of those weaponization efforts. It it is currently investigating the pre-2003 program again over Iran’s failure to declare materials and activities as required by its safeguards agreement.

Even if Iran was weaponizing, the most direct route to blocking the program would be the JCPOA Iran nuclear agreement, which Biden said was “a gigantic mistake” for Trump to break in his recent July 13 interview.

But, though Biden likes to score easy points by criticizing Trump, his policy is but an echo of his predecessor’s today. The Biden administration initially refused to commit to a promise that it would honor a renegotiated agreement and not withdraw from the pact again. And only did it finally make that commitment — for just the duration of his own term — only after the refusal caused a stir in Washington, according to Parsi.

The Biden administration has refused to de-list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations, a major roadblock to a new agreement. In his July 13 interview, Biden went so far as to say that he is committed to keeping the IRGC on the Foreign Terrorist Organization List even if that killed the chance of a new deal.

Putting the two promises of the Biden interview together leads to the seemingly absurd conclusion that Biden would go to war with Iran rather than delist the IRGC. But it’s even more perverse because it deliberately ignores that on June 19, Iran reportedly dropped the demand to de-list the IRGC, which has been confirmed by sources since.

A further problem with the Biden administration’s willingness to go to war with Iran if Iran breaks its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment not to build a nuclear weapon is that the U.S. is in violation of its own NPT commitments, which are to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Rather than pursuing nuclear disarmament, the U.S. has modernized and enhanced its own nuclear arsenal all along.

Finally, there remains the question of why the US would go to war with Iran if Iran were to pursue a nuclear weapon. Why Iran? Aside from the war to ostensibly stop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the US never went to war to prevent any other country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The U.S. has promised to keep nuclear programs of friendly countries secret. The U.S. aided India in its nuclear weapons program. Though India is in defiance of Security Council Resolution 1172, which calls on it to eliminate the nuclear weapons it acquired outside the framework of the NPT, in 2008, the U.S. moved the Nuclear Suppliers Group to provide India a waiver and permit it to participate in the trade of civilian nuclear material and equipment.

After India acquired the bomb, China helped India’s rival, Pakistan, to acquire a bomb of its own. The U.S. turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s efforts in exchange for Pakistan’s crucial assistance in Afghanistan. Washington even sold Pakistan the F-16 jets that would become part of its nuclear strike force, as reported by Andrew Small in The China-Pakistan Axis.

Even North Korea, a declared adversary, has not been targeted for war or for “all elements of U.S. national power” for its nuclear weapons program.

All of these concerns highlight the danger and the absurdity of the Biden administration’s commitment under the newly announced Jerusalem U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/ ... inst-iran/

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

Mossad-affiliated terrorist group captured in Iran

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In recent months, infiltration and terrorism attempts against the Iranian nation have proliferated. | Photo: Hispan TV
Published 24 July 2022

Iranian authorities indicated that the suspected Israeli spies were caught in possession of modern technology and explosives.

Iranian Security Forces arrested a terrorist group affiliated with the Israeli foreign espionage agency (Mossad) on Saturday, according to a statement from the local Intelligence Ministry.

It was learned that the subjects were identified and arrested through a series of preventive operations, in multiple stages, before they could carry out the planned acts of sabotage, without offering other details.

"Their weapons, explosives, as well as technical and communication equipment were also discovered and confiscated," says the official note.


According to the statements, the command was aimed at executing unprecedented terrorist acts in some sensitive areas, with well-studied and predetermined targets, "using the most modern equipment and powerful explosives."

The text indicates that the group infiltrated Persian territory through the Iraqi Kurdistan region and was in contact with Mossad agents in neighboring countries.


The level of conspiratorial activity by various Western intelligence agencies against Iran has risen sharply in recent times, as recently captured spies confirm.

The Mossad and the Shin Bet, just to mention a few, have among their permanent plans the creation of disturbances, confusion and insecurity among the inhabitants of that nation.

The group captured last April, as the regional prosecutor Mehdi Shamsabadi reported at the time, planned to assassinate several nuclear scientists.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/capturan ... -0011.html

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 24, 2022 1:58 pm

Iranian State TV Raises Death Toll in Amini Protests to 26

Image
A participant holds an illustration showing Mahsa Amini during a rally in Berlin, Germany, 23 September 2022. | Photo: EFE/EPA/CLEMENS BILAN

Published 23 September 2022 (11 hours 12 minutes ago)

Iranian state television on Friday raised to 26 the number of people killed in the protests that have occurred in the country for a week over the case of Mahsa Amin, who died after being arrested for not wearing a veil properly.

"Unfortunately, 26 people, including policemen, have died in the incidents," said IRIB television, which qualified that this was its count and not government data.

The protests began on Friday last week with the death of Mahsa Amini after the morality police arrested her for improperly wearing the veil and have been spreading across the country.

Pro government demonstrations against the protests occurred in major cities across the country as well.

"The cause of the protests is America," pro-government demonstrators shouted today at Tehran University after Friday prayers.

In addition, the Iranian Army warned that it "stands ready" to assist the Police in dealing with the protesters "to defend national security."

The military called the protests that have been shaking Iran for a week "desperate actions of the enemy's diabolical strategy to weaken the Islamic regime" in a statement.

Amini was arrested on Tuesday last week by the so-called Morality Police in Tehran, where she was visiting. She was taken to a police station to attend "one hour of re-education" for wearing the veil incorrectly.

She died three days later in a hospital where she arrived in a coma after suffering a heart attack, which the authorities have attributed to health problems, something rejected by the family.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ira ... -0021.html

A very bad deal which must be accounted for. Of course the very idea of 'religious police' is repugnant. Which makes me wonder why the West never mentions the religious police of Saudi Arabia, who have executed people for witchcraft among other perversity.

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

Tudeh Party of Iran, "Down with the Dictator!": There is no end to the regime's murderous thuggery!
9/20/22 3:01 PM

Statement of the Tudeh Party of Iran -"Down with the Dictator!": There is no end to the regime's murderous thuggery!



On 28 June 2022, Ali Khamenei broadcasted a message on social media designed to intimidate the people [of Iran] and brazenly defend the murderous crimes of the regime during the 1980s - threatening to have them repeated in the current conditions, stating,"The God of the 1980s is the same God as this year's!".This is a clear sign of the [veteran] dictator's concerns about the regime's critical situation.

In recent months [especially since May], we have witnessed the increased brutal repression and violence of the dictatorship's thugs against the people of our country, especially against women who have had enough of the inhumane and medieval policies of the regime. In recent days, we bore witness to the latest murderous atrocity by the Supreme Leader’s mercenaries. Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, a 22-year-old woman from the city of Saqqez [in western Iran] who had travelled to the capital, Tehran, on a family visit, was arrested on Tuesday 13 September at a Metro station in Tehran on the alleged groundsthat she was not wearing a complete ["proper"] hijab by agents of the "Gasht-e Ershad" ["Guidance Patrol" a.k.a "morality police"]. She was then taken to one of the detention centres of this organisation on Vozara Street, Tehran. According to the various reports, a few hours later, Ms. Amini was transferred to the intensive care unit of Kasra Hospital in a critical condition. She was pronounced dead on Friday 16 September.

According to a report by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), security officers transferred Ms. Amini to the morality police detention centre (Vozara) having toldher brother that she would be released once she had attended the mandatory one-hour "re-education/orientation" session [to atone for her alleged indiscretion].However,Ms. Amini was allegedly beaten while in detention and, after a few hours (causing delay in urgently needed medical treatment), was then transferred from the detention centre to Tehran's Kasra Hospital. Those who were leaving the detention centre described Ms. Amini'stransfer to the hospital coinciding with a sudden change inthe mood and an extremely tense atmosphere thereafter. Security forces then began to use violence and pepper spray on the worried familymembers of the detainees who were gathering outside the detention centre.

There have been several reports of further significant gatherings, especially of women protesters, outside Kasra Hospital. The news of this horrendous crime has strongly reverberated throughout Iran, and the statements issued by popular organisations and prominent figures inside the country serve to underline the broad dimensions of people's outrage. Ms. Amini's body was buried this morning in herhometown (Saqqez) in the midst of a large gathering of people chanting slogans such as "Down with the dictator!". On her temporary tombstone, it simply reads: "Dear Zhina, you will not die, your name will become our symbol [of resistance]".

The tragic death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the criminals of the Islamic Republic of Iran, took place while our people were commemorating the "National Catastrophe" of 1988 [the massacre of thousands of political prisoners by the regime] committed by murderers such as Ebrahim Raisi [the current president]. Once more, this case clearly shows that, for as long as the current illegitimate and unpopular regime remains in power, there can be no hope for an end to the tyranny and the violent and bloody repression of people's rights and freedoms. While condemning this latest horrific crime committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Tudeh Party of Iran reiterates its call upon all progressive and freedom-loving forces of Iran, and the world, to form a coordinated and widespread protest against the crimes of the theocratic regime of the Supreme Leader.Suffice to state, the Islamic Republic regime is beyond any reform, and we must therefore strengthen, widen, and coordinate the popular struggles to pave the way for a decisive end to this catastrophe and move towards the establishment of a national and democratic government.

The Tudeh Party of Iran

17 September 2022

http://solidnet.org/article/Tudeh-Party ... -thuggery/

Does Tudeh have sufficient strength to replace the 'dictator'? If not I'd suggest a little forethought before throwing the baby out with the bathwater....If overthrowing the 'dictator' leads to a loss of sovereignty then perhaps the timing is not auspicious.
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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 26, 2022 2:34 pm

What is Really Behind Iran’s Unrest?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 25, 2022



The Western media is depicting unrest in Iran as “the people” demanding social justice and women’s rights. In reality, it is part of a years-long effort by Washington to foment upheaval and regime change in Iran. Policy papers from 2009 detailed step-by-step how the US could overthrow the Iranian government and install an obedient client regime in its place. Since then, each step has been implemented verbatim with varying degress of success, and the process, as we can now see, continues today.

References:

BBC – Iran protests: Mahsa Amini’s death puts morality police under spotlight: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle

Reuters – https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-

Washington Post – Anger against Iran’s ‘morality police’ erupts after death of Mahsa Amini: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/

TIME – Who Gets to Wear a Headscarf? The Complicated History Behind France’s Latest Hijab Controversy: https://time.com/6049226/france-hijab

Brookings Institution – Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran (2009): https://www.brookings.edu/book/which-

Reuters – U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran (2009): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ir

Financial Times – US boosts funding of tech companies to help anti-Tehran protests (2020): https://www.ft.com/content/740a385a-3

Reuters – U.S. to drop Iranian MEK group from terrorist list: officials: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ir

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/09/ ... ns-unrest/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 05, 2022 1:47 pm

Dirty Money: Meet the US Agent Driving the Cia-Led Riots in Iran
OCTOBER 4, 2022

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Masih Alinejad. Photo: Al Mayadeen.

By Mona Issa – Sep 28, 2022

The largest color revolution attempt in recent Iranian history is led by a woman on Washington’s payroll – and we have the facts.

There are Iranian women, though a minority, who are not in favor of the mandatory veil – a legitimate grievance, an opinionated dissatisfaction to which humankind is entitled. And then there are people leading a fraudulent anti-hijab movement with a barrel aimed at Tehran.

Masoumeh “Masih” Alinejad-Ghomi

Meet Masih Alinejad, Washington’s weapon of choice for flaring up the largest color revolution attempt in Iran today.

“I’m leading this movement,” Alinejad, 46, told The New Yorker on Saturday. “The Iranian regime will be brought down by women. I believe this.”

Operating from an FBI safehouse, Alinejad has been living in the US for the past decade working as a full-timer for VOA Persia – or, Voice of America, Persia – Washington’s propaganda mouthpiece funded directly by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a soft power arm of the empire fully funded by US Congress, made to capitalize on harmful narratives in favor of Washington’s corporatocracy.

Alinejad’s tasks are quite a few: To take cozy photographs with the world’s most effective pro-war politicians who’ve only done everything to wipe out West Asia, such as Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo, and Madeleine “The price is worth it [to kill Iraqi children]” Albright.

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Alinejad striking a pose next to the first female war criminal in the United States, Madeleine Albright, after giving a speech at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) on December 6, 2018.

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Iranian agent Masih Alinejad in a meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on February 4, 2019, in Washington DC. (US Virtual Embassy of Iran)
But, that’s not all. Between 2015 and 2022, the US Agency for Global Media paid Alinejad over $628,000 to harass veiled women, spew propaganda, and demand more sanctions against her country (not a very patriotic thing to do). Alinejad has been doing everything in her media power to isolate her country, attempting to render it a pariah state banned from all diplomatic, economic and political privileges in the global arena. Indeed, a champion for imperialism, Alinejad is on a fat CIA payroll to incite violence and lies.

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Masih Alinejad’s US government payroll is visible on a number of websites, such as govtribe.com and USASpending.gov, just by punching in her UEI in the search bar: H2JFTHB14639.

The latest narrative exploited by Alinejad is as such: 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, in a CCTV footage, gets in a verbal dispute with a female police officer over the way she had her hijab wrapped around her head. There is no escalation for the dispute; the woman leaves the girl alone and walks away. In a matter of seconds, the young woman freezes, bends, and falls over a chair to which bystanders ran to attend. The girl, who had underwent an open brain surgery in 2006, sustained a heart attack which put her in a coma. Two days later, she was announced dead, after which Western tabloids accused Iranian police of beating Amini to death, leading to the riots.

Mahsa Amini’s Death and Western Obduracy in Accepting the Truth


Admitting to lead the riots against the government is only a statement. Her tweets further expose her agenda – the transfer in narrative from one tweet to the next is baffling.

On September 14, the day Amini suffered a heart attack, Alinejad made no mention of beating or violence. She wrote on Twitter: “Amini suffers heart attack after being arrested by morality police.”

On September 15, the CIA asset ramps up the rhetoric a notch: “This woman is in a coma because morality police savagely arrest her.” Still, no mention of abuse, beatings or physical violence.


Between that tweet and a comment, Alinejad caters to her bosses: “Amini is in a coma after being beaten by morality police.”


On September 16, the day the young woman was announced dead, Alinejad launched a hashtag which she had been paving fertile grounds for: “#MahsaWasMurdered by the Islamic Republic’s hijab police in Iran.”


Washington’s lackeys were at work too: One of the first to accuse the police of beating Amini was Maziar Bahari-founded IranWire. Bahari is an anti-Tehran Iranian exile who has admitted to “covering illegal demonstrations” and “helped promote color revolutions” in Iran. An empire asset.

The second Twitter post which propagated the false narrative was from Babak Taghvaee, a double-agent exile accused of disseminating sensitive information to the CIA and Mossad; a military contributor to Israel Hayom, Pentagon research reports, and US State Department-funded Radio Free Asia/Radio Liberty, which is also on a BBG payroll.

With the hundreds of fake accounts which trended the matter on social media, the tweets gained massive momentum, and riots were immediately stirred up. Terrorist groups among the crowds were detected and arrested carrying sharp weapons and explosives, killings were carried out with the aim to blame on the government, and rioters burned banks and other irrelevant state institutions, creating chaos. The MEK, mind you, has been a terrorist organization in the US until being delisted in 2014 – the year Alinejad made her way to the US. Now, tabloids pair “freedom-loving Iranians” with MEK supporters and organizers.


Washington for long has tried to mobilize Iranians against their government, either through media propaganda, or through sanctions. The chaos brewing is a dream come true for Alinejad, a byproduct of over decades of work. A Wikileaks cable from 2009 sent to the US State Department wrote about a dissatisfied Alinejad complaining of a “lack of cohesion among reformists” which was impeding Washington’s plans and interests.

Global media, Hillary Clinton, Regime-change Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and the NED have all simultaneously bandwagoned on the campaign, shedding crocodile tears on Iranian women. Mind you, these entities have projected, enabled and funded the most brutal, patriarchal policies against women around the world, including in the United States. There was no regard for Palestinian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Libyan or Syrian women when the US either bombed or funded weaponry to bomb societies back into the Stone Age. Washington funds the most repressive entity in West Asia today, “Israel,” whose system bases itself on racism, rape and uprooting.

Not to mention the sanctions which Alinejad has repeatedly called for to be implemented against Iran, as she “believes” they work. Sanctions have affected the lifestyles of many Iranian women, impeding them from their right to sanitation, securing quality nutrition and health for their children, and utilizing resources for healthy living. Not so feminist, is it?

Liberal Feminism is an Imperialist Project – Part 1


The hijab is a democratically voted and a legitimatized law

Perhaps Big Media’s abuse of freedom is not leaving any space for us to investigate. Facts, when conveyed effectively, are an angry mass’ greatest sedative: After Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government was toppled in 1979, revolution leader Imam Khomeini held a nationwide referendum on which people voted whether or not they advocated for Iran to be ruled by an Islamic constitution. Within this context, Iranian women integrated the hijab into the constitution, and Iranian women have the right to revoke it if they wanted to. The law is a democratic decision made by the people and the women of Iran. Hence, the legitimacy of the law is still intact.

The popular support for the law was reiterated in a 2014 national poll which collected data from all provinces across the country, holding the question of whether they agree that the mandatory hijab should be implemented on Iranian women even if they do not agree with it. Around 19% of the population completely agreed, 35% simply agreed, and 25% were neutral.

In 2021, Iranian deputy speaker of the parliament Ali Motahhari suggested another referendum on the veil be conducted when protests again were on the rise, exhibiting the democratic values which the state holds, as opposed to what the West paints the country to be – a clerical wasteland dictatorship.

So the question here is: What is there to fight for when Iranian women themselves are in favor of the hijab by popular referendum and demonstration? Do the West and its blinded followers want to save Iranian women from themselves?

For a population widely familiar with Edward Said’s Orientalism, this projection could be quite embarrassing.

The infiltration and disruption of a society

In 2002, former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu held a two-hour-and-a-half-hour conference just before George Bush announced his invasion of Iraq, in which he called on the United States to foment regime change in Iran (and Iraq, obviously), offering an explanation on how to dismantle the anti-imperialist social fabric in the country. In his vision, Fox Broadcasting would air “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place” to Iranians through their televisions. “This is pretty subversive stuff,” he remarked. “The kids of Iran would want the nice clothes they see on those shows. They would want the swimming pools and fancy lifestyles.”

The current riots in Iran are not an event suspended in time, but rather a continuation of years of disruption attempts by people like Alinejad and Netanyahu. The very social fabric of the country is what kicked out Western greed in 1979; a fabric largely built on cultural affluence and appreciation for tradition brewed over the course of centuries. To shift that fabric would entail transforming the material conditions. Hedonism, pleasure and materialism are weapons in a toolbox used to dumb down communities into virtual enslavement.

Hollywood has proved itself as one of the best tools to redefine the values of freedom, so effective that even Arab media have been throwing Western cultural projections onto Iranian women, who are largely supportive of the mandatory veil.

Hearts may be in the right direction, but not in the right place. Activists on social media have taken to advocate for the “autonomy” of Iranian women (according to their standards and terms), regardless that it may not be consistent with the nature of their state or society.

If we truly want to help and support Iranian women, we must first bring our cultural projections to consciousness – Are we truly supporting their struggle, or are we telling them how they should live their lives? For a society which is proud and emotionally attached to its culture, are we doing justice by following governmental-funded tabloids attempting to dismantle the very fabric of an anti-imperialist society which has evolved so progressively?

There isn’t much predictability about when the fog of propaganda would clear up so we could perceive matters free of the manufactured anger that the media has managed to muster from millions.

https://orinocotribune.com/dirty-money- ... s-in-iran/

Violence in Iran; Is It Internal or External in Its Inception?
OCTOBER 4, 2022

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Photo composition showing two TV screens, in which the image of Mahsa Amini and the other with no signal. Photo: Al Mayadeen.

By Fra Hughes – Sep 30, 2022

Be careful what you call for at a time when the imperialists want war with China, Russia, and Iran.

The tragic death of a young woman in an Iranian police station who was seen collapsing on CCTV is a devastating blow to her family and friends.

We all mourn the loss of an innocent young woman while we await the official outcome concerning the cause of her death.

While local police are still investigating the cause of death, the Western mainstream media claim she was beaten to death.

The reaction here in Ireland and the UK has been almost instantaneous and universal.

Rallies and marches defending the right of women to choose whether or not to wear the Hijab are taking place in towns and cities in the UK and Ireland.

The irony or hypocrisy of these rallies is open to debate, so let’s have a look at what’s happening.

There are no rallies for the millions starving in Yemen.

No mass rallies for the besieged people of Donbass, but we do have rallies to support Ukrainian fascists.

No rallies against the daily brutality of the unelected, unmandated Gulf monarchies or the excesses of Mohammed Bin Salman, Crown Prince of Al Saud and the man accused of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

They did have rallies against Saddam Hussein. Rallies against Gaddafi and rallies against Al-Assad; all presidents of countries that had to fight national wars of liberation to free their people from foreign imperialist military occupation.

They had rallies against Serbia.

They had rallies in favor of color revolutions, the so-called Arab spring, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Ukraine.

Question: What is the common denominator here?

Answer: Western imperialist foreign policy.

The West supports and indeed arms Saudi Arabia in its grotesque war on Yemen because it suits the regional aspirations of NATO, the EU, America, and “Israel”.

They destroyed Libya and Iraq while balkanizing Syria and sanctioning Iran.

China is bad, Russia is bad, Iran is bad, yet right-wing governments in Kiev, Warsaw, and Budapest are good, as are the death squads in Columbia and the assassinations of Iranian scientists.

We must be careful not to conflate civil rights with regime change.

Let’s be very clear about what is happening in Iran.

Syria has been destroyed by external forces using internal divisions to destabilize the government. The same happened in Libya, Ukraine, and most recently in Belarus. The last thing the people in Iran need is violence orchestrated by “Israel”, the UK, the US, France, and Germany, etc., using the hijab as a pretext not to “liberate women from religious domination” but to destroy the country.

Be careful what you call for at a time when the imperialists want war with China, Russia, and Iran.

If you stand against the Iranian government at this time, you will be supporting the destruction of another sovereign nation and all that entails; refugees, death, injuries, and destruction.

Is that what you want, or can you not see past the sound bites and propaganda photos?

Wake up, wise up, and grow up, to the realities of where this might be going.

I was at a protest one time at city hall in Belfast, where I called out, “Free Julian Assange.” A young woman turned towards me and said he was a rapist, “I believe the women.”

I told her she would be better believing the evidence as there was none.

This woman believed the lies of the mainstream media and simply repeated a sound bite, “I believe the women.”

She had not researched the data, nor looked behind the headlines.

Kier Stammer imprisoned Julian Assange on trumped-up charges as part of the elaborate ruse to extradite him to the US.

The Western masses are bombarded with a constant stream of lies, propaganda, and misdirection, while the demonization of peoples, governments, and sovereign nations that are not already under Western or Zionist domination runs riot.

How often have we seen this regime change handbook played out?

Do you remember the nurse in Kuwait who claimed to have witnessed seeing Iraqi troops taking babies out of warm incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor while stealing the equipment?

It turns out that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to America.

Now we have Western media claiming the young woman, Mahsa Amini, 22, who died in a Tehran police station, was beaten to death by the police.

That might happen if you are Black and living in America, but it doesn’t happen in Iran, unless, of course, you choose to believe the BBC, Fox News, CNN, Le Monde, etc.

“If you’re not aware, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are exercising oppression.” Malcolm X

Ultimately, the Iranian establishment must release all available evidence into how Mahsa died, including the post-mortem results.

Mahsa Amini’s Death and Western Obduracy in Accepting the Truth


If there is foul play, people must be held to account.

If she died of natural causes, then Western propaganda must be discarded.

Iran has been under sanctions and siege since 1979.

The only people who want destabilization in Iran are not the Iranians but the enemies of Iran.

I do have issues with the religious aspects of the Iranian government, but as the regional bulwark against Zionist expansionism and as leaders of the Axis of resistance, we need a strong, just, and civil rights compliant Iran to help create a more multi-polar world and equitable planet.

Let’s not destroy Iran on false allegations.

Let’s stand by the leader of the Resistance in West Asia and the cultural values of Persians.



(Al Mayadeen – English)

https://orinocotribune.com/violence-in- ... inception/

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

Fighting for the rights and sovereignty of Iranian women
October 3, 2022 Lallan Schoenstein

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The solidarity movement of the Iranian women evoked by the brutal death of Mahsa Amin can serve to encourage women in the U.S. to fight back against the combined repression of the state and the church on their reproductive health.

The undemocratic ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court eliminating women’s right to abortion is overwhelmingly unpopular. The justices who are appointed for life are not elected. The majority of judges profess conservative religious zeal and far right-wing political ideology. In one 2022 decision, they moved to undo the First Amendment’s separation of church and state in public schools.

The Biden administration, which was elected in opposition to the Trump crowd, appears to be doing nothing to check the Supreme Court’s rabid implementation of racism and bigotry. In states around the country, voting rights are being challenged, history lessons forbidden in schools, the right to gender freedom denied, and state violence against people of color, LGBTQ2S, and disadvantaged workers is validated.

With that in mind, consider the problems faced by our sisters in the Iranian movement. Why is the powerful U.S. corporate media giving it a thumbs up? Why is the Biden administration seeking ways to intervene? President Biden publicly sided with the protesters in his speech at the United Nations. And his administration has moved to set up satellite links and social media with the intention of spurring opposition to the government with dubious information from the U.S.

U.S. economic sanctions on Iran

Can it be that they are concerned about the lives of Iranian women? The hypocrisy is startling.

Harsh U.S. economic sanctions against Iran began in 1979 and have generally been tightened during the following years. Donald Trump tossed out a deal made by Barack Obama that relaxed the sanctions to deny Iran the development of nuclear energy, a move meant to block the economic development of Iran. Trump amped up the most punishing sanctions, and Biden has not returned to the deal made by Obama.

The years of U.S. economic sanctions have deprived the entire population of the basic necessities of survival. Women, children and the elderly suffer most from the U.S. sanctions, which even include denying basic medical supplies.

U.S. sanctions are a form of economic warfare. Sanctions have been imposed on Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iraq, Cuba, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela — among others.

The goal of sanctions is to destabilize the country and bring about regime change, to deprive those countries of self-determination. U.S. sanctions endanger people’s lives, particularly those already most vulnerable in society: children, women and oppressed genders.

The human toll was devastating when sanctions were imposed on Iraq. According to the Geneva International Center for Justice, some 1.5 million children were killed by U.S. sanctions on Iraq.

The catastrophic results of U.S.-imposed regime change can be seen in the countries surrounding Iran.

U.S. imperialism and Iran

The U.S. media dwells on the theocratic form of the Iranian government as if the enactment of archaic forms of religious law were unheard of (what about the U.S. Supreme Court?). Even more importantly, how did the Iranian religious leaders come to power?

In 1951 a progressive leader named Mohammed Mosaddeq became Prime Minister of Iran with the rise of massive popular support. Under his leadership, the Iranians nationalized their oil industry. When the Shah, a monarch of the Iranian Pahlavi dynasty, tried to intercede to protect Anglo-U.S. oil interests, the Shah was forced into exile.

The United States CIA, with the active support of the British MI6, responded by organizing a coup. Mosaddeq was arrested and tried for treason. All opposition to the Shah, which had been led by the National Front and Communist Tudeh Party, was suppressed. The U.S. reinstated the Shah’s rule under a martial law regime with brutal measures such as banning the gathering of three or more people. An international consortium took over the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years. The U.S. supplied military aid while Iranian workers suffered ever deeper poverty levels, dislocation and decay.

The Iranian Revolution

During the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution, Sam Marcy wrote in November 1978: “The Shah of Iran has not yet been overthrown, but no monarch has ever been so completely a prisoner in his own palace and so thoroughly hated by the overwhelming bulk of the population as is Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.”

Marcy was a leading Marxist thinker, an active supporter of the Iranian Revolution whose writings were followed by some Iranian revolutionaries.

“First, it should be noted that all the social classes in Iran today — not merely one or the most oppressed but all the classes — are in political motion. None of the classes can any longer openly champion the status quo. To one degree or another, the bourgeoisie, the comprador bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie in the rural and urban centers, and, needless to say, the workers and the peasants, agree either expressly or by implication that the status quo, the present situation, is unendurable and that the consequent political crisis must be resolved now.”

Thus, the Iranian Revolution began in 1978 with workers’ strikes, most notably the Iranian petroleum workers. Major demonstrations that faced a hail of bullets arose, “not only so in Tehran, in Tabriz, in Isfahan, in Abadan, but all over the country.” The hated SAVAK, the military police of the Shah, was defeated, and large segments of the conscript army came under the influence of the revolution.

Despite the support of Jimmy Carter’s administration, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was kicked out and forced to retreat to a safe haven in Texas.

At the time, Marcy wrote: “The leadership of the overall anti-Shah opposition is in the hands of bourgeois democratic forces concentrated principally around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a religious leader, and not in the hands of a working-class party.

“This should not be surprising in the light of the catastrophic consequences following the imperialist-engineered overthrow of the Mossadegh regime. What followed was not the mere installation of a puppet in the person of the Shah, but the extermination of practically an entire generation of militants, revolutionaries, and progressives in the annihilation that followed, as were other progressives. A historic defeat of such magnitude as entailed by the overthrow of the Mossadegh government not merely wipes out a generation of political leadership and activists in the anti-imperialist and working class movements, it also leaves a wide generation gap which a long period of repression has filled in with other social and political forces.”

The Islamic Republic

Ayatollah Khomeini took over the Tehran government, and Iran officially became the Islamic Republic on April 1, 1979. The revolution became limited to the political overthrow of the Shah. The class structure — relations between exploiter and exploited classes — remained intact. The revolution did succeed in releasing the working class from a fascist dictatorship.

The working class, weakened by years of imperialist and colonial domination, succeeded by joining a united front with a hostile class represented by the clerical Khomeini regime. They needed to join other forces to fight for their sovereignty while not subordinating their class interests.

In 1979 Marcy warned: Workers in the U.S. need to avoid the imperialist anti-Muslim bias and consider the difference “between the religious leader of an oppressed country who fights imperialism as against one who, no matter how lofty or advanced his bourgeois conceptions may be, conciliates with imperialism.”

Thirty years later, John Parker, who traveled to Iran in an anti-war delegation in 2010, reported some facts never mentioned in corporate media attacks against Iran. Parker says that more than 65% of Iran’s university students are women, as are more than a third of the doctors. At the time of the 1979 Revolution, 90% of rural women were illiterate; even in towns, the figure was 45%. So, in a little over 30 years, tremendous strides were made in regard to educational opportunities for women. Now large numbers of increasingly well-educated women have been entering the workforce.

Critical support for the current movement

While the mouthpieces of U.S. imperialist interests loudly champion women’s rights, there is no evidence that the U.S. government has alleviated gender oppression anywhere abroad or at home. Quite the opposite.

It is crucial to support Iran’s women and oppressed genders by fighting to end U.S. sanctions, which oppress all the women and oppressed genders in Iran. It is the foremost way to back the fight for self-determination and defend against the opportunistic advances of those who wish to return them to the decades of colonial exploitation.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ian-women/

I think there a class aspect to this with upper class women wishing to ape their sisters among the Golden Billion being the vast majority of the anti-hijab crowd. My sympathy therefore does not extend too far.... Of course these religious strictures are unfair and should not exist but every society progresses at it's own rate. Look how well forcing the issue has worked in Afghanistan...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 12, 2022 2:02 pm

Iran’s anti-morality police protests: a different view from the ground
October 12, 2022 Max Blumenthal

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Setareh Sadeghi, an Esfahan, Iran-based scholar and teacher, provides Max Blumenthal with a complex view of Iran’s protests against the country’s morality police and the death of Mahsa Amini never heard in U.S. mainstream media.

A full transcript of Sadeghi’s conversation with Blumenthal is below.




MAX BLUMENTHAL: Welcome to The Grayzone. It’s Max Blumenthal.

Protests inside Iran triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was picked up by Iran’s morality police on the grounds of supposed indecent exposure, have drawn massive international attention. Media around the world are following these protests, and on social media, the hashtag surrounding Mahsa Amini’s name has generated more attention and retweets than almost any hashtag in Twitter history.

So how much of this international response is authentic? And how much of it is related to genuine concern for Iranian women—and not long-standing Western desire for regime change in Tehran? To better understand this issue, I spoke to a woman inside Iran. Her name is Setareh Sadeghi. She is an independent researcher, a translator, a teacher, and a Ph.D. She lives in the city of Esfahan.

Setareh Sadeghi, let’s talk about you and your own political views before we get into some of the details of these protests and the campaign behind them.

You studied the U.S. Civil Rights Movement as part of your Ph.D., and you’re also a student of propaganda [analysis]. Where do you situate yourself within the Iranian political spectrum, and specifically do you support women protesting the morality police and issues like the hijab?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, yes, as you mentioned, I finished my Ph.D. in American Studies, and I studied propaganda analysis as part of my Ph.D. dissertation, and the rhetoric of social movements as well. So, I have always been supportive of the Iranian government as a whole—the notion of an Islamic republic—but I have also been critical towards a lot of the things that happen in my country, like many of the other people who live here.

So, for the issue of hijab, as someone who believes in hijab and has always practiced it, I am totally against the morality police. By the way, in Farsi, the word that we use for it is the “Guidance Patrol,” but in English, it’s usually referred to as the morality police, and I’m totally against it. I have been a part of the people, especially women, who took it online and used hashtags to talk about how they do not believe in the morality police even though they believe in hijab. And this is not something new. It has been in place from many years ago, but it’s become more significant this year.

So, even before these protests and before the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, people were talking about it online and I was also one of them because I saw this was totally unacceptable. And even in my personal life—because I have friends who do not believe in the hijab and they don’t want to practice it, or they practiced it in a way that did not fit the standards of the Islamic Republic’s law of the dress code, and they were stopped by the morality police. In at least three cases that I remember, I would just go talk to the morality police and tell them, as someone who believes in hijab, I am totally against what they’re doing, and this is not the way they should enforce the law. Because it’s not always that they…the morality police don’t always arrest people. Their main job was to go and tell people. But even that, I’m totally against it and I don’t think that’s something that works, mainly because a lot of people who live here believe in some sort of dress code. I think as a woman, I think that’s not something that people should tell us. Like, I believe in law and order, but also, I don’t like being told those details, like how to dress and how to appear in public.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, what is the role of the morality police, and how much public opposition is there to this unit of the security services? And are they known for being as brutal as they’re currently being portrayed?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, yes, they are known as being brutal because Iranian women don’t find it acceptable—not necessarily because everything that they do is brutal, but some harsh treatments are an integral part of the way they enforce the hijab law. But it’s also that, while I think a lot of people are against the morality police, it’s not that everyone is against the mandatory hijab law. So, these are two things that should be studied differently. A lot of people, I mean, there are different surveys, and different surveys in different provinces show a different percentage of people believing in obligatory or mandatory hijab, and I think that’s something that has to be dealt with based on the local culture of each province.

And that is also reflective of how the protests are going on, for example, in my hometown, because it’s considered more conservative and more traditional. The protests there are very much smaller than what you could see in other cities, for example, in Tehran or Rasht or other cities where the protests were significant compared to what is going on in my town. So, yeah, there are also people who believe that the morality police should be in place but the methods that they’re using should be different.

So, I think if you want to categorize women and people who live inside Iran, we have people who are totally against the mandatory hijab. They don’t believe in hijab at all and, obviously, they don’t believe in morality police. We have people who believe in hijab, but they don’t believe in the morality police or the mandatory hijab. We have people who believe in hijab, and they believe in the morality police, but they don’t believe in the methods that they are using. And that also creates a collective of people who are against the morality police but, again, based on how they feel towards it, their participation in these protests is different.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, let’s talk about the issue of Mahsa Amini. What do we know about her death? Most people in the West who are following this believe she was beaten to death by the morality police in police custody. Has that been established as the case, and is that the understanding even of the protesters in Iran?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Not really. I mean, even a lot of those Western media outlets corrected their headlines or started using different terms, referring to the case when the CCTV footage of the moment when Mahsa Amini fell and went into a coma was published. So, a lot of people believed that footage, about how some people said that she had bruises on her legs when she was taken to hospital, which shows that there was a beating. But the footage clearly shows that she was in good health conditions when she was there, based on what we see.

An investigation has been ordered. The files all are not yet published. There are talks about it, but there’s not a final statement by the state. The last thing that they have said is that the probe shows that there was no beating involved. They even released the CT scans of her brain and, as I said, there was CCTV footage. So, while there are protesters who believe that the beating happened, there are also a lot of protesters who think that it did not happen. But the fact that a young woman died in police custody only because of violating the dress code is something unacceptable, no matter what exactly happened in police custody.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: You’re in Esfahan, which is a large city in Iran, outside of Tehran. Most of the protests, as far as we know, have been centered in the capital of Tehran, and you have been receiving a wave of death threats for reporting that the protests in your city were very small and that the protests have not spread to key Iranian cities. Is that still the case?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, because I have already blocked a lot of people, and because the person who started those threats, as someone who knew me in person, at this point I can say that I haven’t received any new threats. But it was because I appear on different media and I have talked about Iran as a political analyst, I’ve always received insulting or sometimes death threats. But this time it was really unprecedented, as it was started by someone who knew me in person and had my personal information, and even the number of the people who attacked me was really huge.

And it started with the Independence Farsi account on Instagram, publishing a snippet of my interview and disregarding all the criticism that I had against the morality police, the crackdown on everything, and just saying that I lied about the number of the people participating in the protests, or the fact that these protests are much smaller than the ones that we witnessed, for example, in Esfahan in 2019. But at the same time there were a lot of people who were totally against even the Islamic Republic. But I mentioned that, and they verified it and they said that they were part of the protests, and that’s true. It was not significant because, as I said, Esfahan is a conservative and more traditional city, and people take to the streets on different issues. The morality police are, I guess, not the number one issue for people who live here. And I talked to my friends who don’t observe the hijab completely or according to the law, and they said that this is really not their number one issue, and so they don’t want to be part of the protests.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. We’ve seen large protests over the price of food or economic issues in Iran that were totally ignored in Western media. So, what do you make of the response in Western media, not just Western broadcast media but social media as well? The Mahsa Amini hashtag is one of the most popular hashtags in history, as you tweeted. It’s as if there are no other issues in the entire world. Do you think the outrage that we’ve seen on social media is authentic, or something that is being encouraged or pushed by Western—specifically NATO—states, the same way that there was a massive social media amplification campaign around the so-called Arab Spring?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, social media has never been a true reflection of what’s happening in different societies, especially not Iranian society, because Twitter is blocked here, and a lot of people do not have access to it. So, the number of Iranian users on Twitter is not significant because they use other [platforms]. For example, Instagram. Before these protests Instagram was not blocked, and a very large proportion of the population had Instagram accounts, especially because they also used it for selling products and they had their businesses on it; especially a lot of women run their own business on Instagram. But Twitter is very different and it’s something that is known by Iranians. Even those who are on Twitter, they know that it’s very different from the realities on the ground. And it’s surprising how when there was, especially in those towns where the protests were met, the crackdown on it was really severe and a lot of people couldn’t even use the hashtags, [but then] broke a record, which tells us that there is something that doesn’t come from Iran.

And there is a history of fake hashtags and fake accounts and trolls on Twitter, trying to portray Iran in a different way, and it’s not only about a protest. There are other cases. For example, there was a time when, if you posted anything positive about your life in Iran, you would be attacked by these trolls, because they said that you are normalizing Iranian people’s misery as if there is no normal life in Iran and the only thing that you are allowed to post online about Iran is just all the problems and the grievances. They attacked a university professor for only posting pictures of him[self] inside a cafe in Tehran, for example.

So, we also have the case of Heshmat Alavi, who apparently is a Twitter user who posts against the Islamic Republic on Twitter. And it’s interesting that when Trump withdrew from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action known commonly as the Iran nuclear deal], he mentioned that the JCPOA is facilitating Iran’s crackdown on its people or on certain issues, and two Washington Post journalists asked for a source. And the source that Trump offered was an article written by Heshmat Alavi. And an MEK defector later also talked about how the camp in Albania, the MEK camp in Albania, uses its members to start hashtags and make them a trend, and they’re paid to post about it.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Just quickly, for those who don’t know, the MEK is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is a U.S.- and Saudi-backed opposition movement, dedicated explicitly to regime change in Iran and replacing it with its cult-like leader, Maryam Rajavi. They have been based in Albania under the watch of the U.S. military and U.S. intelligence, and it’s there that they maintain a troll farm, as you said, to spin out hashtags against the government in Iran. And this account, Heshmat Alavi, apparently was a sock puppet run out of this troll farm.

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, that’s what the investigation shows. And even for the recent hashtag, the historical hashtag trends about Mahsa Amini, a few Iranian users track them and try to find out where those hashtags come from. And then you see a lot of users just posting nonsense, like alphabets and then using the hashtags, and right now I think it surpassed a hundred million times the hashtag words in Farsi and in English, and they come from a limited number of users. I think it’s less than 300,000 users that have been using the hashtags, but it already has the historical trend on Twitter.

And it’s interesting how, as you said, the protests in 2019, because at that time they were also really huge in my neighborhood. And in Esfahan I did not see any reflection of it online, because usually, like that protest was more by the working class and the middle class because it had economic causes, and it affected a larger proportion of the population. So naturally it was bigger, but you wouldn’t hear about it 24/7 on mainstream media or on social media. But this time, it’s a social issue, and it’s a very important issue for women, but at the same time it’s not really as big as the previous protests that we had. But we already have a historical record of hashtags for it, so it totally shows that it’s not reflective of what is actually going on in Iran.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, The New York Times is also reporting that the U.S. State Department and its allies are trying to get communication gear into Iran. However, much of the noise about these protests appears to be coming from the outside. Because of an issue that Westerners can relate to, we’re deluged with identity politics here and we don’t have large economic protests here in the United States anymore, outside of maybe some union activity, some strikes. This is a case of the weaponization of identity, and obviously, a real issue, as you point out, a real issue with the morality police maybe not at the top of the agenda but something that upsets a section of the population in Iran.

But outside much of the noise is being made by Iranian exiles or ex-pats, and one of the key voices who’s emerged in U.S. media, cable news media, is a figure named Masih Alinejad, who I’m sure you know. She’s been backed by the U.S. government, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with the Voice of America, which is the U.S. government’s global broadcasting system. She’s met with former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Recently she cooked up a phony plot in coordination with the U.S. government and the FBI, claiming that the Venezuelan security services were going to kidnap her and take her on speed boats to Iran. It was one of the most ridiculous plots I’ve ever heard, and it was widely reported in U.S. media. Now she’s back. So, what do you make of Iranian ex-pats kind of taking the mic and becoming the voice of the Iranian public?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, I wouldn’t mind. Obviously, Iranian women would be very happy if those in exile really wanted to be a voice for women inside, but the thing is they are just echoing the voice of, I would say, a minority and just a section of the population in Iran that they agree with.

I think they also believe in the Western liberal notion of freedom for women, and not the notion—they don’t really care. I’m not talking about everyone, obviously, but some of these people who are given a voice and whose voices are amplified over the voices of women inside Iran, they’re just repeating the Western notion of freedom for women. And they do not understand that women in Iran can have a different notion of freedom, and [that] they have other priorities when it comes to women’s rights and women’s activism.

And a lot of women here are working towards that. They are organizing, they are using online campaigns to pursue Iranian women’s rights. But these voices from outside really make our struggle more difficult. Instead of, for example, calling for the U.S. government or the EU to lift sanctions on Iran that are hurting ordinary Iranian people and making it more difficult for women to find, for example, job opportunities or to just be an active part of the society, they are calling for their own notion. They’re calling for something that they believe would be liberating for Iranian women, but that’s not necessarily the case for the majority of Iranian women. And I personally find it kind of insulting, because it is like you are disregarding and discrediting Iranian women.

Iranian women inside Iran are very powerful. A large proportion of Iranian women—or the majority of Iranian women, actually it’s a high percentage—go to colleges and they’re highly educated. We have women in business, we have women in medicine and universities, and women are a very active part of the society, so they know how to pursue reforms. For example, there is this case. You can see online that there is civil disobedience happening inside Iran without any hashtags or calls from outside, and it is helping women here. For example, in my town, riding a bicycle for women was not by law forbidden, but culturally there were a group of extra-conservative religious people in Esfahan who were against riding bicycles for women, and they were calling for that to happen, they were saying that we’re not going to allow that. Women did not take to Twitter to talk about it. They did not make a fuss about it and start running a protest. What they did instead was, a lot of women, many of them in full hijab and full covering, started riding their bicycles through the city. And now it has become an absolute normal scene in my city, and those conservative groups cannot oppose it anymore. This is how civil disobedience and pursuing reform works. Because a lot of the things we see, for example, that the government is actually imposing or implementing comes from the fact that there is a large proportion of the population that believes in those things.

So, we need education; it’s a progress, it’s a process of reforming and educating women and educating men about women’s rights. It doesn’t happen by a hashtag revolution and just taking to the streets. And then it’s very easy for these protests to get violent, and there are people who abuse it. It starts with slogans for women’s rights, but it ends up with slogans against establishment and calling for the overthrowing of the establishment. So, a lot of women don’t want to be a part of that simply because they see how this is hijacked, how this is exaggerated by Western media and social media as well. And so, they see the realities, and they see those reflections, and they don’t want to be a part of it. But they do their job for seeking reform and educating their family members and being an active part of this process of bringing change to their society.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, aside from the Iranian ex-pats who were getting a lot of attention and speaking out on behalf of all Iranians, you have major celebrities sharing the Mahsa Amini hashtag. What do you make of the participation of celebrities, Hollywood stars, and recording artists? And how much do they really know about the situation inside Iran? Are they getting anything wrong?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, while I hope a lot of them have the good intention of supporting Iranian women—and it’s only out of ignorance, not that they have been paid or supported by the U.S. government to do that—I think it’s very hypocritical because they didn’t talk about how sanctions have been hurting Iranian people and Iranian women and taking opportunities away from them. For example, as an academic, like a lot of my colleagues have experienced that their papers, their academic publications are not even considered, only because they come from Iran. That’s also a form of injustice. I mean, that affects only the academia in Iran, but sanctions affect ordinary people. They are really affecting ordinary Iranians and making it impossible, for example, people with cancer to provide their medicines, to find their medicines. A lot of medical companies refuse to sell Iran medicine, citing U.S. sanctions, because there are a lot of European companies who just do not want to stand against the U.S. pressure to abide by these sanctions, so they just refuse to sell medicine. It’s not always directly from those companies; it’s also because of the international sanctions on Iranian banks that make it impossible for Iran to buy those medicines. So, there are a lot of factors involved that are making it impossible. So, I personally—and I’m sure a lot of people—find it really hypocritical.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, you mentioned some violence taking place. We’ve seen police officers be killed and a number of deaths, as well as what appears to be armed clashes on the Iranian-Iraqi border. Are these protests turning violent, and are they being infiltrated by violent elements who actually have very little interest in women’s rights?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yes, that’s, unfortunately, the case. Iranian women rightfully wanted to protest and take to the streets and make a statement to the state, which I think they have already made, but there were elements who infiltrated it and started violence, like attacks on public property, even on people’s property. They burned people’s cars, there were shootings, and a lot of people have died in these protests, many of them who were women. And it’s not everyone died because of police shootings or police crackdowns. A lot of those people died because of the thugs and mobs that were involved in these protests. And obviously, like you said, they don’t care about women’s rights. They have another agenda to follow.

And this is also another reason a lot of women who maybe initially were protesting took a line to talk about that, that this is absolutely not what women want, and it’s not supporting women’s rights. But there were also, like I said, peaceful protests going on, and they didn’t receive crackdowns, obviously, because they weren’t as violent. In universities and on different streets where people just were peacefully protesting without burning things down. But with those infiltrations, it became very difficult to keep them peaceful.

And, also, you asked me about the Kurdish environment, right?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, Mahsa Amini was Kurdish, and many of the protests have taken place in Kurdish areas, if I’m not incorrect. So, how is the Kurdish issue influencing these protests?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, well, it appears that one of Mahsa Amini’s cousins was a member of one of these Kurdish separatist movements which have also carried out terrorist acts, but obviously she had nothing to do with these people. But this cousin abused or exploited his relation[ship] with Mahsa Amini, to say that this was to [be] portrayed as an ethnic issue. But Mahsa’s family, including her uncle, spoke out and said that ‘This has nothing to do with our ethnicity. We are Kurdish, but this is about Iran and women’s rights. It has nothing to do with our ethnicity. This involves everyone.’

But different leaders of Kurdish movements inside Iran and outside, like the ones in Iraqi Kurdistan as well, started saying that they were planning for the protests, and they called for people to take to the streets. And even the slogan that has become popular for this movement, which is translated into “Women, Life, Liberty,” that’s a popular Kurdish slogan. And it’s beautiful and people relate to it, but even the slogan came from these Kurdish ethnic groups that were involved, and by now one of the cities at the border witnessed attacks on police stations by some of these Kurdish elements. And Iran started—because they were funded and armed from outside Iran, from Iraqi Kurdistan—Iran also started attacking their bases in Iraq. And just recently, just yesterday, a lot of people, at least, I think about eleven people died in these attacks. But the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] has made it clear that they won’t stop until they just back down.

And I think it’s also important to know that I have Kurdish family members and they do not see themselves a part of it at all. So, it’s not about the ethnicity. It’s about a group funded by outside sources wanting to exploit these protests and break a rock on Iran and the society.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, those Kurdish separatists on the Iraqi side of the border are part of the Barzani clan, right? Which has been historically backed by the U.S. and armed by the U.S..

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, and Mossad at some time. Yeah, that’s true.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And the Israeli Mossad.

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, that’s why. And Iranian people have a really bitter memory of their activities in Iran. They have killed a lot of people within the Kurdish region. And they have been given a platform by, for example, BBC Persian and other propaganda by the British government and the U.S. government, which, again, doesn’t resonate with what’s going on in Iran and makes a lot of Iranians angry, because it’s really not about ethnicity at all. I mean, Mahsa Amini’s family made it very clear that they consider themselves Iranian before anything and it’s really not about ethnicity. But these people are totally disregarding that. They don’t care about the hair case or the case of women; they’re just exploiting it to create chaos inside Iran and make it very difficult for Iranian people to take part in those protests because they can be easily exploited.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And we saw rather small protests in Cuba in 2021 backed by the U.S., staged by people who’d been involved in U.S. embassy programs, be exploited by the Biden administration to justify not returning to the normalization deal that the Obama administration had hashed out with the Cuban government. Do you think these protests will have a similar effect, and will provide the Biden administration with justification for not returning to the JCPOA Iran deal that the Obama administration and the Iranian government agreed to?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Absolutely. And not only that, I think it gives more justification for the U.S. government to impose even more sanctions on Iranian people, which, as I said, and the UN also acknowledges that the unilateral coercive measures by the United States are hurting ordinary people in Iran, especially women. I mean, they’re taking a lot of opportunities away from women. So, yeah, that’s why this is another reason for me, for example, and a lot of people in Iran and a lot of women inside Iran, that if these protests are going to lead to more sanctions, which seems to be the case already, they don’t want to be a part of this.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And do you think that these protests and the attendant violence could prove destabilizing to Iran’s internal security or expand in any way?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, by now the protests are almost finished and everyone is talking about how there are no longer massive protests. And even on outlets, especially Persian-speaking TV, for example, like BBC or Manoto or VOA Persian, they tried hard to say that the protests are still going on. And I was checking the hashtags today and there are still millions of hashtags for what’s going on in Iran, but if you go on the streets and just walk around, even in Tehran by now there’s really nothing significant happening. In Esfahan, it’s almost over. It’s very insignificant, and that’s something that you will hear from a lot of people who live here, and actually in certain neighborhoods if you walk you would never see anything. I had a friend of my family saying that if a tourist comes to Iran at this time and they go walk around Esfahan, they will believe that whatever they heard on social media or mainstream media was absolutely fake. That’s how normal life is just going on in Iran, and things are gradually going back to normal. Even the Internet crackdown eased today, and that’s why I’ve been able to do this interview.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, looks like at this point the medium is the message. Setareh Sadeghi, thanks so much for joining us at The Grayzone and keeping us informed.

SETAREH SADEGHI: Thank you for having me and giving me a platform, as someone who lives in Iran, to have a voice.

Source: Greyzone

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Re: Iran

Post by blindpig » Sun Oct 16, 2022 2:29 pm

Behind The Iranian Riots

Over the last weeks there were some riots in Iran. At first there were protest about the falsely reported death of a young women, Mahsa Amini, who had suddenly collapsed (video) while waiting in a police station. She died a few days later. Mahsa Amini had previously had brain surgery and her collapse and death were related to that, not to police action.

The protests by mostly women, and supported by a well known U.S. government employee, were soon taken over by separatist groups who turned them into riots. This especially in the northwestern Kurdish border region and the southeastern Baloch region. These groups are know to have foreign support. Police stations were attacked, cars were set on fire and night riots set off. In total some 24 policemen and some 100 protesters died.

It is not the first time that such riots are happening in Iran. The 2007 riots were launched after peaceful protests against a petrol price increase and the 2017 riots after peaceful protests over general economic hardship. Each time the protests were taken over by foreign directed groups and ended in serious riots that caused some death. After a month or two the situations calmed down.

Something similar is happening now.

As usual the riots have 'western' media support, most notoriously from the New York Times. Here is a fine example:

‘It Was a Massacre’: How Security Forces Cracked Down in Southeastern Iran
A New York Times analysis of witness testimony and videos reveals a bloody scene that unfolded last month in Zahedan during Friday Prayer, with mats as stretchers and bodies piled in cars.

Some of the wounded tried to crawl away to escape the gunfire. Others bled to death on prayer mats as people tried to drag them to safety.
But the snipers and officers kept pulling their triggers, firing bullet after bullet into men and young boys at a worship area where Friday Prayer had been underway.


That sounds as if the police were shooting at will and unprovoked. But some details strewn deeper throughout the story paint a very different picture. If one cuts out the propaganda trash about some video scenes and anonymous Iranian voices making unverifiable claims one can take a less obstructed look at the real situation:

The horrific scene unfolded on Sept. 30 in Zahedan, a city in southeastern Iran that is home to the ethnic Baluch minority, after a small group of worshipers emerged from the Great Mosalla prayer complex to confront security forces posted at a police station across the street.
...
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, an elite branch of the armed forces, has confirmed that its forces were present in Zahedan, and that six of its members were killed that day, including its regional intelligence chief, Col. Ali Mousavi, and officers from the feared Basij militia. They have denied firing on civilians.
Witnesses said that a number of Iranian security officers were killed, but that they died later during street clashes.

The protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and threw rocks at the officers, prompting the security forces to fire indiscriminately into the crowd, according to witnesses. As the demonstrators scattered, the gunshots stalked their retreat back toward the complex, where thousands were still praying
...
But according to the cleric and two other witnesses, a group of 10 to 15 young worshipers left the complex before prayers had concluded to gather outside the police station.

A video verified by The Times shows some of the protesters throwing rocks at the police station, where security forces stood on the roof, as gunshots are heard. Witnesses said that some protesters hurled Molotov cocktails.

The forces responded with gunfire, witnesses said.

One video verified by The Times shows two men who appear to be in uniform standing alongside another man on the roof of the police station firing what seems to be a pump-action shotgun in the direction of the mosque.
...
As the day went on, more civilians swarmed into the streets as they became aware of the violence taking place in the city.

They were met with Persian-speaking security forces, in traditional Baluch clothing, who emerged from cars before firing on the protesters, some of whom fought back with Molotov cocktails and bullets, according to witnesses. Most of the clashes took place on a street near the Makki mosque where hundreds had gathered.


The riots in Zahedan were organized by some well resourced group, likely financed by this or that U.S. government program:

The day before the shootings in Zahedan, protesters began calling for a “broad uprising” in “all of the towns of Baluchestan,” as an act of “solidarity with Kurdistan and in protest of the rape of the Baluch girl,” according to a poster advertising the demonstrations. The Kurdistan region of Iran has also seen major protests in recent weeks and has been subject to attacks by government forces.

The alleged 'rape of the Baloch girl' is unconfirmed and likely just another false accusation.

To sum it up:

A group of well organized and armed provocateurs attacked policemen and tried to set a police station on fire. The police did not agree with that. It used pump-action shotguns with can be used with either birdshot or anti-riot ammunition. More people came. Some of them had guns.

Who actually shot the people and the IRGC men who died is unexplained. Who the alleged 'snipers' were is also unexplained. The Times presumes that they were police but provides no evidence for that conclusion. Like during the 2014 Maidan riots the snipers might have been provocateurs hired to shot at both sides, protesters and policemen.

Zahedan is near the at times unruly border with Pakistan. That is why IRGC and other security forces are stationed there.

I find this sentence somewhat funny:

They were met with Persian-speaking security forces, in traditional Baluch clothing, ...

Is this supposed to be sinister?

While Baloch people often speak Balochi, it is a local Iranian dialect. Persian (Farsi) is the official government language of Iran and taught in all schools. That some 'Persian-speaking' security forces were wearing the usual local civil clothing (loose long shirts without buttons) should not astonish anyone. Such undercover tactics are used all over the world.

Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian is not amused about being lectured by 'western' officials about police behavior during armed riots:

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has underscored that Iran is the anchor of stability and security in the region and not the land of velvet or colorful coup, slamming foreign intervention by some Western countries in Iran.
In a phone call with High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, the Iranian foreign minister said that, “the death of the late Mahsa Amini is a painful for all of us,” however, he pointed out that this issue is just regarded as a pretext for (intervention of) some western authorities.
...
“Peaceful demands are different from riots, murders, arson, and terrorist operations,” he pointed out.

On the same topic, the Iranian FM also questioned “Who would believe that the death of a girl is so important to Westerners? If so, what did they do to the hundreds of thousands of martyrs and dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon? They wanted to start a sectarian war in Iran.”
...
The Iranian FM said that for instance, in Zahedan, “there was no slogan or photo of Mahsa, and a known terrorist group tried to start a conflict between Shias and Sunnis, and they claimed responsibility for it. (The terrorist groups) did the same in part of Kurdistan, but the insight of Sunni scholars and people foiled their attempts.”


The riots have died down. The CIA will prepare the separatist groups it finances for another round to be launched when the next random reason for some peaceful protest can be found to hide in. Iran is by now well aware of this tactic and its security forces are trained to defend against such nonsense.

The Biden administration will use the Iranian police action against rioters to justify that it is breaking its election promise to reenter the nuclear deal with Iran. The U.S. will not be happy about the long term consequences of that failure.

Posted by b on October 15, 2022 at 16:51 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/10/b ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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