In
a cycle of habit borne out repeatedly in the mainstream western media,
demonization and fear mongering against Iran is picking up pace again in
the face of attempts by the new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to
rebuild relations with the west and work toward international
cooperation. The techniques and methodologies used by the west in
perpetuating the geopolitically-motivated, neo-imperialist, agenda
against Iran often come across in the media as clumsy and awkward in
their reasoning. Before delving into the hard geopolitical reality, a
much needed word on the disingenuous leveraging of human-rights against
countries such as Iran is critical.
Iran and the Western “Human Rights Card”
In a recent
Fox News report,
Iran’s human rights record is criticized by Benjamin Weinthal, a
Berlin-based fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
His arguments are employed to argue against the feasibility of pragmatic
negotiations with Iran as according to his logic, Iran is not a regime
“worthy” of practical negotiation with. To use the reported human right
violations against religious minorities and Christians and particular as
geopolitical leverage to argue against diplomacy and negotiation with
Iran wreaks of compromised, corporate-financier motivation, especially
when juxtaposed with the intimate collaboration of the United States and its allies with one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East (and the world), Saudi Arabia. and religious symbols, especially in airport customs searches including the shredding of any Bibles found and in one case,
harassing a nun who was passing through Jeddah on a transit flight.
Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with the United States, is currently promoting a sectarian-extremist-driven destabilization
campaign in Syria whose byproduct has resulted in nightmarish lives for
people across religious lines which can be described as nothing less
than premeditated genocide
with former CIA official Robert Baer predicting campaigns against
Christians in Syria and Lebanon during an interview with Seymour Hersh
for his excellent 2007 article, “
The Redirection.”
What is rather ironic in
light of western focus on Iran is that Baer stated that joint
US-Saudi-Israeli machinations in Lebanon, which were generating radical
Islamist groups, would necessitate the protection of Christians which
would be done by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and the Shiites as
opposed to the US and France. Iran is predominantly Shiite and while
conservative Islam is the norm, this conservatism is distinct from the
twisted inventions and atrocities of radical Wahabism in Saudi Arabia which serve as the hotbed of global Al Qaeda activity.
Let it not be forgotten that Saudi Arabia is the
primary underwriter
of Al Qaeda’s proliferation throughout Eurasia, done admittedly and
particularly in line with western imperialist designs of isolating Iran
and serving as geopolitical pawns. It is noted that the Taliban and the
Wahabi fundamentalists that constitute its ranks and the ranks of
extremists from Nigeria to the Philippines would not exist without Saudi
financing done purposefully to create a twisted brand of Islam and
produce a “Swiss-Army knife” to be used against the targets of western
foreign policy such as Syria today and previously against
Afghanistan during the 1980s; it has since formed the cornerstone of the
fake “war on terror” driven by
western neo-imperialist interests. The
largest arms sale in U.S. history has been to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia regularly conducts brutal executions through the means
of hooded swordsmen including on religious charges of being accused of “
sorcery and witchcraft” in the grimly-dubbed “
Chop-Chop Square.”
Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and foreign women cannot
visit the country without being accompanied by a male guardian. In
addition to toeing the line of western corporate-financier geopolitical
agendas
in cooperation with Israel such as in Syria, the Saudi establishment interlocks with these interests as noted in points “6” and “7” in the article “
Introducing the Gulf State Despots” by Tony Cartalucci.
Iran, which may have its shortcoming, has an unprecedented standard
when compared to Saudi Arabia. Iranian Jews, Christians, and
Zoroastrians are guaranteed their own seats on the Iranian parliament in
proportion to their population. Iranian Jews, roughly 30,000 in
population, enjoy relatively peaceful lives in Iran with a Jewish
hospital, two kosher restaurants in Tehran, 11 synagogues, many with
Hebrew schools, and a Jewish library including 20,000 titles. Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini issued edits in the 1980s stating that Iran’s Jewish
and Christian populations be “protected.” Many of these points are noted
by Benjamin Schett’s article “
Debunking Anti-Iran Propaganda” which conflict with the gravely austere picture painted by western media. This short
documentary by Journeyman Pictures gives a candid picture of Jewish life in Iran.
It is often claimed that Iran promotes institutionalized anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial but
Benjamin Schett
explains why this is not true. Ahmadinejad has made accusations against
the reliability of the Holocaust but this does NOT represent the
position of the Iranian state or people whose state-media even
broadcasted a popular,
Hollywood-quality film
commemorating the suffering of the Jews and featuring the story of
Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian diplomat who helped save Jews from the
Holocaust by giving them false passports to flee Nazi-occupied France.
Iran’s former Jewish Member of Parliament, Moris Motamed, has
criticized Ahmadinejad
for his statements on the Holocaust and even held a press conference to
denounce those statements. However, such sentiments must not be seen as
reflecting the entirety of the Iranian society as clearly is not the
case.
Criticism against Israel is mainstream and expected but not because
of any religious animosity towards the Jews, as Ahmadinejad himself
stated in a speech in Esfahan cited by Schett, but rather because of the
complicated political issues surrounding the
Palestinian plight.
Benjamin Schett notes
that it is impossible to give 100% insight of life as a religious
minority in a religiously conservative country without being in that
position oneself but unlike in Saudi Arabia, at least such minorities
openly exist. Of course, such minorities must not settle for the bare
minimum and as a westerner, I’m in the tradition of the equality for
all. If and where any cases of rights violations exist, such as those
noted in the original Fox News article by Benjamin Weinthal, they must
be openly addressed but done so in a manner unlike the western media’s
purpose which is to highlight certain facts, at the expense of others,
and use any incident they can as propaganda fodder for the sake of western geopolitical objectives
aimed at stifling peace and diplomacy, substituting it with
war-mongering, and covering up the west and its assets’ own serial
crimes against humanity.
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD): Is it Really About Democracy?
Of
particular interest in the Fox News article is that the author,
Benjamin Weinthal, is listed as a fellow at the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies (FDD), an organization with a vested interest in
promoting western corporate- financier objectives around the world with
human rights simply employed as an easily-leveraged cloak for naked
imperialism. I will assume good faith on the part of Benjamin Wienthal
as many people drawn into organizations and NGOs that served western
subversion are drawn it by honest intentions which is something that
imperialist systems exploit as they have in history.
Nevertheless, the overall bulk and existence of the FDD cannot be
casually excused when one gets an insight into the interests and
networks propping it up. Tony Cartalucci in his excellent article, “
The War on Terror is a Fraud”, explains the FDD:
FDD’s “
executive team” includes James Woolsey and Clifford May, while its “
leadership council” includes Bill Kristol – all signatories of a recent Foreign Policy Initiative
letter addressed to House Republicans
asking them to discard the UN mandate for NATO’s Libyan intervention
and commit more support specifically for regime change. Acting
Senator Joseph Lieberman also can be found on FDD’s “leadership council” and has been a chief proponent of war with Libya, as well as Syria and Iran,
alongside John McCain.
FDD has a myriad of publications expressing the elation of the
“Neo-Conservative” establishment over current operations against Libya
and the possible springboard the Libyan war serves toward US
intervention in Syria and Iran. FDD’s only criticism of Obama is that
more should be done, faster, and at a greater expense to America.
Michael Ledeen, a “freedom scholar,” expresses this well in his article
titled, “Lessons of Libya (and Syria, and, Some Day, Iran),” where he throws in his organization’s collective desire to intervene in both Syria and Iran, for good measure.
The Atlantic article, “
Al-Qaeda Is Winning,”
written by FDD “senior fellow” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, expresses the
true contempt these individuals have toward their audience. In this
piece reflecting on the last 10 years of the “War on Terror,”
Gartenstein-Ross claims that Al Qaeda’s ability to use cheap means to
provoke the United States into a multi-billion dollar defense is
rendering an Al Qaeda victory through a “strategy of a thousand cuts.”
Of course, the x-ray machines and other security apparatuses being
installed across the United States and the tremendous amount of money
being used to sustain combat operations around the world “hunting
terrorists,” doesn’t go into a black hole. Instead, it goes into the
pockets of the very people funding the work of Mr. Daveed
Gartenstein-Ross and his peers throughout his and other US and British
think-tanks.
Those who have read
my recent article on Libya
will note the entirely illegitimate nature of the NATO campaign against
Libya and the intellectually bankrupt mentality of those who shamefully
perpetuate its talking-points. The FDD, at the top of the organization,
is not merely concerned with human rights themselves but rather
leveraging such concerns for their own sake, something the US government
and the corporate-financier interests it represents have clearly done
before
with regards to China.
It should be noted that the FDD is just one element in the
neo-imperialist racket. Other corporate-financier, “globalist”
think-tanks, who are the true underwriters of western policy, includes
the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the International
Crisis Group, and the Brookings Institute. In “
Naming Names: Your Real Government”,
Tony Cartalucci points out who truly controls the United States/NATO
and lists the prominent individuals and corporations financing and
directing them.
Iran and the Western Geopolitical Struggle
The Brookings Institution is of
particular concern among these think-tanks as it has been the primary
facilitator in the drive for war against Iran founded on distortion and
geopolitically-motivated propaganda. Contrary to media reports
portraying Iran as an immediate, existential threat to US and Israeli
security, the
Brookings Institute released a policy report that was basically a handbook for overthrowing nations titled
Which Path to Persia? (.PDF). It was written by six prominent analysts within establishment circles, including
Kenneth Pollack,
admitting that Iran poses not a threat to the survival of the United
States and Israel’s security but their collective regional and
geopolitical hegemony and interests across the region. It was noted that
Iran was playing a strategy of firmness and even aggressiveness but not
recklessness in combating western hegemony and imperialism as can be
seen in its recent economic endeavors in the
pipeline and gas politics of the region.
It was also noted that Iran was deliberately avoiding a conflagration
with the west and that any possible nuclear weapons capability for Iran
(which is noted as unconfirmed and nonexistent in other reports) would
be used as a deterrence for attack and protecting regional ambitions
Iran has for the region (pg. 24-25).
This is reconfirmed by the recent 2013
RAND Corporation report Iran After the Bomb
which while noting that no evidence exists that Iran is pursuing
nuclear weapons according to the US intelligence community, envisions a
post-nuclear scenario of Iran. RAND is another “globalist” think-tank
that hosts compromised interests but manages to give an honest synopsis
of the Iranian reality. It is also noted that Iran’s “supreme leader”
Ayatollah Khamenei has issued religious decrees labeling nuclear weapons
as “against Islamic principles.” Contrary to recent reports circulation
by MEMRI TV and mainstream media, these fatwas are not fake and actually do exist. And contrary to some critics, they are not an example of taqiyya (deception) as Juan Cole notes. One thing that is very revealing is the following statement by RAND which sums up their insightful report:
The
Islamic Republic [of Iran] is a revisionist state that seeks to
undermine what it perceives to be the American-dominated order in the
Middle East. However, it does not have territorial ambitions and does
not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations. Its chief military
aim is to deter a U.S. and/or Israeli military attack while it
undermines American allies in the Middle East [which includes the
economic interests of the totalitarian kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and
Qatar whose atrocities in human rights dwarfs anything Iran is guilty
of]… Iran’s
possession of nuclear weapons will lead to greater tension between the
Shi’a theocracy and the conservative Sunni monarchies [Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, etc.] However, Iran is unlikely to use nuclear weapons against
other Muslim countries…The Islamic Republic views Israel in ideological
terms. However, it is very unlikely that Iran would use nuclear weapons
against Israel, given the latter’s overwhelming conventional and nuclear
military superiority. (pg. vii)
The Brookings Institution
not only enumerates transparently the similar points that Iran is not
an existential threat but goes further to enumerate a list of strategies
for US provocations against Iran to initiate a war that, according to
the report, Iran does not want. It is even noted that an Iranian
retaliation in the case of American airstrikes would not be inevitable
and that Iran may deliberately refrain from retaliation in order to
strategically “play the victim” (pg. 84-85, 95) Let it not be forgotten
how the US and Britain staged the CIA “Operation Ajax”
in 1953 to oust the democratically-elected Iranian president Mohammad
Mosaddegh, who nationalized the country’s oil, in favor of the
pro-American Shah who ruled as a brutal dictator. Similar plans for
regime change are enumerated in the Brookings Institute report where it
is admitted that the opposition “Green Movement” in 2009 was
orchestrated by the US government through “civil society and NGOs” in
order to provoke Iranian belligerence through regime change operations,
capitalizing on internal dissent. This is not to deny any legitimate
aspirations and calls for reform in Iran which are prevalent among
student groups but merely to point out how such ambitions are co-opted
and used by western interests for their own agenda (103-105, 109-110).
See this excellent summary of all these critical points.
Other means proposed
included playing upon sectarian and ethnic divisions inside Iran to
destabilize the country and even funding radical Sunni militant groups,
specifically the MEK, which has killed Americans in the past and is
labeled by the U.S. state department as a “foreign terrorist
organization”. Its ideology is described by analysts as radical
“left-wing” Islamic-Marxism which makes it interesting to consider the
US plans to fully employ this group as political assets. MEK has also
collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s forces in guerilla warfare against
Iran in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s (113, 117-118). The group is
against the dominant Iranian establishment and it is noted that the US
has worked covertly with them in the past and that in order to work
overtly with them, the group had to be removed from the terrorist list
(118). Regarding the MEK on pages 117-118, Brookings states:
“Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most
controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a
potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of
Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e
Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and
indeed anti-American.
In contrast, the group’s champions
contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian
regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering
operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also
argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit
of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in
the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for
regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering
intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of
intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran
for enriching uranium.
Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK
remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations.
In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian
contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group
praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino
reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks,
within the group celebrations were widespread.
Undeniably, the group has conducted
terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are
directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group
bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then
the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an
estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed
credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other
assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001.
At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an
overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of
foreign terrorist organizations.”
The compounded criminality of western and Israeli collaboration with MEK is emphasized
here.
It should be noted that the MEK has recently been removed from the US
list of terrorist organizations as part of the next phase of using them
as a proxy. MEK claims to have killed 40,000 Iranians in the past and
has been trained on U.S. soil in a secret base in Nevada, published on
the Huffington Post and
cited here by Kurt Nimmo in an excellent and well-sourced article emphasizing the coordinated western agenda against Iran.
In culminating these abhorrent proposals, Brookings further notes the
option of a military invasion and conventional war against Iran if the
above proposals failed to accomplish western interests. This is the most
alarming option especially in context to the following admission:
If the United States were to decide that to garner
greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or
provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait
for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might
stretch out indefinitely. ..However, since it would be up to Iran to
make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times
in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would
get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at
all (65)… it would be far more preferable if the United States could
cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes [as a
catalyst for an invasion] before launching them. Clearly, the more
outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action,
the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very
difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation
without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then
undermine it (85).
In all this certified criminality, which has obviously been at play
even as the report was being published in 2009, it must not be forgotten
that the
Brookings Institution is of, for, and by big business
and their collective agenda of integrating Iran into their
international consensus and exploiting its 76 million population for
their unipolar order. This is opposed to Iran’s attempts to foster
national self-sufficiency and develop ties with nations strategic to
western interests including
India, Thailand,
China, and Russia. Brookings Institution is funded by the likes of the
Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, The Carnegie Foundation,
Goldman Sachs, and the Carlyle Group among others; their report even
includes a special acknowledgement of financial support from the Smith
Richardson Foundation upon which Zbigniew Brzezinski sits as an active
governor as pointed out by Tony Cartalucci and easily verifiable in the
report’s preface.
Such international criminality is magnified when Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist
Seymour Hersh revealed
in his article “Preparing the Battlefield” that the U.S. is cooperating
with their anti-Iranian terrorist asset, Saudi Arabia, in order to fund
radical,
Al Qaeda-linked, Sunni-groups like the Jundallah
to destabilize and destroy Iran as a viable geopolitical opponent. Al
Qaeda, directed by the Saudis in cooperation with western geopolitical
objectives, has been leveraged as a “Swiss army knife of
destabilization” across the Middle East in the fake “war on terror” as
Seymour Hersh exposed in another report titled “
The Redirection”
published in 2007. In that report, Hersh reveals that the U.S. and
Saudi Arabia have been working since 2007 to destabilize Syria and
Lebanon with a wave of sectarian-extremists currently being marketed in
the media as a “political uprising” and a “revolution”. This is
different from the legitimate internal political opposition in Syria
that has collaborated with the Syrian government in a reform initiative
and maintains distinctiveness from the extremist and terrorist elements
that clearly constitute the bulk of the “Syrian rebels” supported by the
west. In his report, Seymour Hersh states:
To undermine Iran, which is
predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to
reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the
Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is
Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah,
the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken
part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A
by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni
extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile
to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda…[Saudi Arabia's Prince] Bandar
and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a
very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was
‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we
don’t want the Salafis [Al Qaeda] to throw bombs; it’s who they throw
them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they
continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.
There is no doubt that there is an anti-Iranian proxy conflict being waged in Syria by a
joint US-Saudi-Israeli effort to further the
Wall Street-London geopolitical consensus. Undermining and destabilizing Syria would further isolate Iran and perpetuate
the united geopolitical front
against Iran that has been the objective of western politicians and
think-tanks. Iran would ultimately serve as a vital door into central
Asia and a springboard against
Russia and China
who are the ultimate target for absorption within the western design of
a unipolar world order. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who is an active agent in the networks of these
machinations, makes it no secret in his book The Grand Chessboard that U.S. “global pre-eminence” (a euphemism for Wall Street/London geopolitical
domination and a unipolar world order) is the agenda along with
American influence in central Asia to which Iran is a doorway. Russian
President Vladimir Putin has also spoken of hegemonic ambitions on the
part of the west to establish a unipolar order at a 2007 Munich conference.
In addition to this evidence of open subversion, it must be noted that
Clinton Bastin, former director of US nuclear weapons production programs, has sent an open letter to President Obama
in December 2011 claiming that there is no nuclear weapons threat from
Iran, stating the following on Iran’s nuclear weapons program:
The
ultimate product of Iran’s gas centrifuge facilities would be highly
enriched uranium hexafluoride, a gas that cannot be used to make a
weapon. Converting the gas to metal, fabricating components and
assembling them with high explosives using dangerous and difficult
technology that has never been used in Iran would take many years after a
diversion of three tons of low enriched uranium gas from fully
safeguarded inventories. The resulting weapon, if intended for delivery
by missile, would have a yield equivalent to that of a kiloton of
conventional high explosives.
As
warmongering against Iran is expected to drastically pick up pace as
western designs for domination across the Middle East show increasing
signs of faltering, it is absolutely critical to be educated on these
matters in order to undermine and extinguish the effects of the media
propaganda echo-chamber. This is not to deny any human rights
accusations against Iran altogether but one must guard themselves from
being misguided and swayed by disingenuous corporate-financier, globalist interests
seeking to expand their empire. It is imperative for people around the
world to recognize the corporations and institutions perpetuating
systematic atrocities and genocide across the planet and realize that
once they eliminate the sovereignty of other countries, they will then
turn their attention fully to the people within their own borders in the
west.
A real revolution
will come by boycotting the degenerate corporations and financier
interests seeking to enslave humanity and building up our own
communities to create a world order in our own image and not in the image of Wall Street and London.
Sam Muhho is a student of history and an advocate for anti-imperialism and anti-globalism. He can be reached at smuhho1@gmail.com and runs the Facebook page “Globalist Watch” at facebook.com/gwatch1776 in order to explain the reality at play in global affairs.
