Banality of warmongering:
Islamic Republic apologists in the West are cheering for nuclear weapons
Writers: Mitra Jashni- Shervan Fashandi- William Bijan Mehrvarz
Signatories are listed at the end of the note.
On the 5th and 6th of December 2018, three well-known figures from the so-called “reformist” faction of the Islamic Republic of Iran wrote tweets threatening Western societies from three different Western regions of the globe. One of their tweets directly threatened Europe and the US with an Islamic nuclear-bomb. Many Iranians refer to these so-called reformists as “Fake Opposition Exports.” Their tweets are exactly translated from Persian to English here, along with screenshots of the originals:
Hamzeh Ghalebi, who is an asylee in France, and who currently lives in Paris, tweeted this on December 6th, 2018:
“In order to be able to negotiate with the United States, we should be able to remove the military option from the US table. Given the economic and technological gap between Iran and US, there is only one way to do this, and that’s to achieve “the ability to build” nuclear weapons and “the ability to produce” continental missiles.”
Ehsan Mansouri, asylee in the UK, currently living in London, Tweeted this on December 5th, 2018:
“If the United States returns to the preemptive-war policy of the Bush era, and Iran isn’t able to resolve the problem by then, all of the above modeling[1] will be meaningless; Iran will have no choice but to create the bomb preemptively and make war costly for the US.”
On the same day, Hossein Derakhshan, a known proponent of the Islamic Republic, responded to Mansouri’s statements on Twitter as follows:
“We do not have the slightest power to counteract, and will only get closer to our destruction by withdrawing from the Iran Deal, the JCPOA. We can only threaten Europe with immigration and drug trafficking, and maybe the temporary disruption of oil exports through the Persian Gulf. Stupid strategies for forty years have stopped us from becoming powerful.”
During the contested 2009 Presidential Election, Hamze Ghalebi was an advisor to Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s presidential campaign and in charge of the campaign headquarters. During the era of mass executions in the 1980s, under Supreme Leader Khomeini’s leadership, Mousavi was the Prime Minister during that era and was subsequently nominated for Presidency by the Reformist parties in 2009. He tried to distance himself from his undemocratic and oppressive past by portraying himself as a Democratic Reformist. He lost the race to the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a hardliner) in an election highly suspected of being rigged. Millions of young Iranians, particularly students, who were disappointed by the unfair results, started waves of protests that was labelled the Green Movement. The protests initially raised hopes for the possibility of reforms within the rigid system adopted by the Islamic Republic and make room for a more democratic Iran. The Green Movement was swiftly, and brutally, suppressed by the police force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hamze was held in custody for 70 days in the aftermath of the post-election protests in 2009, and after his release, he left Iran and found asylum in France. Despite claiming to be a Reformist, he holds hostile views towards Israel and calls the Jewish state an apartheid and racist regime, a term also adopted by the hardliners in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as anti-Semites around the world. He has publicly stated that his long-term aspiration is the destruction of the state of Israel [2].
Before seeking asylum in the UK, Ehsan Mansouri was the political secretary of the Islamic Association of Students in Amirkabir University of Technology (formerly known as the Tehran Polytechnic). He supported Mehdi Karroubi, the other so-called Reformist candidate in the same Presidential Election of 2009. Like Hamze Ghalebi, he left Iran in the aftermath of the Green Movement; and after his release from prison in Iran, he sought asylum in UK. Both of them have sought refuge in democratic Western countries, to allegedly escape the crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet, ironically, today they label the regime’s opposition as “destructionist”. By that term, they mean any opposition to the Islamic Republic itself is supported by either the US or Israel, or both, in order to destabilise or destruct it through a civil war as occurred in Syria. They have both stated that they support the Islamic Republic in building nuclear bombs as well as ballistic missiles.
Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian-Canadian blogger who has traveled to Israel twice, claiming that the purpose of those travels was to promote peace in line with the policies of President Khatami, the first so-called Reformist President in the establishment of the Islamic Republic. An Israeli newspaper, Haaretz [3], described him as a person who believed in the Islamic Republic and Ayatollah Khomeini and who, with a Western appearance, equated the significance of Khomeini’s Revolution to the French Revolution.
In an interview with Press TV, the Islamic Republic regime’s English-language news channel, he expressed admiration for Ahmadinejad’s actions, describing them as an effective way of undermining the legitimacy of the state of Israel [4].As a politically correct way of delegitimizing Israel, he proposed to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the strategy of praising and respecting Judaism while simultaneously bashing Zionism [5].
The threats proposed by Hossein Derakhshan in his Tweeted response were reiterated a few days later on December 9th by Hassan Rouhani, the current President of the Islamic Republic, at the counter-terrorism summit in Tehran:
“They must know that by sanctioning Iran, they are hurting our abilities to fight drug trafficking and terrorism. I warn them, if our abilities to fight drug trafficking and terrorism are hurt due to sanctions, you will not survive the waves of refugees, drugs, and bombs. By weakening Iran through sanctions, many will not be safe. Those who do not believe us should take a good look at the map [Possibly referring to the strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf].”
In reviewing these comments, we are identifying and highlighting a discourse that — contrary to both ethical and security concerns — intends to normalise the systematic state violence of the Islamic regime in Iran and to further promote its propaganda.
As the Iranian people are oppressed by the brutality of the Islamic Republic and as the warmongering policies of the regime plunges Iran deeper into isolation on the international stage, these individuals live outside Iran in the free world, and take advantage of the all the freedoms and privileges afforded to them by their host countries, yet they still admire and support the violent policies of the Islamic regime.
We, the undersigned, many of us in exile ourselves because of the human rights violations of the Islamic regime, would like to raise awareness about the network of regime propagandists and apologists in the West. Individuals such as Hamze Ghalebi, Ehsan Mansouri, and Hossein Derakhshan may pose as refugees fleeing persecution from the Islamic regime; yet they openly support the very Islamic Republic that they supposedly fled from. They have gone as far as advocating for development of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and threatening Europe with mass migration, terrorism, and drug trafficking. Whenever, and wherever possible, they infiltrate the Western media to further spread their web of propaganda and disinformation. The next time that you see a supposed “refugee” or “opposition figure” in the Western media making excuses for the crimes committed by the Islamic regime, perhaps you should ask an Iranian friend to review their publications and opinions expressed in Persian.
Signatures:
- Mitra Jashni
- Shervan Fashandi
- Saeed Hossein Pour
- William Bijan Mehrvarz
- Mohsen Mirani
- Borzumehr Toloui
- Sanaz Ariya
References:
- Referring to the previous thread of tweets making the case that eliminating the threat of building an atomic bomb hurts the future Iran-US peace negotiations and the veiled threats of Zarif and Rouhani’s team that resuming uranium enrichment and blocking the Strait of Hormuz are in the best interests of Iran.
- http://www.ensafnews.com/116606/%DA%86%D9%86%D8%AF-%D9%86%DA%A9%D8%AA%D9%87-
Archived: http://archive.fo/lVd5Q - “The King of Iranian Bloggers”, Haaretz, 21 November 2018
https://www.haaretz.com/1.4949553
Archived: http://archive.ph/Muvbm - https://negaam.news/1394/10/10/160654/
Archived: - http://web.archive.org/web/20081024233418/http://i.hoder.com/archives/2008/09/080921_017757.shtml
Archived: http://archive.ph/pGzSl
