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Posts Tagged ‘Hassan Rouhani’

By Farhang Jahanpour

Since the latest Iranian elections held on 26th February 2016 for the 290-seat parliament (Majles) and the 88-member Assembly of Experts there have been many negative comments about the election results from the usual suspects.

Some people who are fundamentally hostile to Iran, criticize everything that Iran does, regardless of outcome. When the leading Iranian reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami won a landslide election in 1997 and initiated a series of important reforms at home and advocated a dialog of civilizations and even made a remarkable offer to the United States to reach a grand bargain over all the issues of contention, some pro-Israeli groups dismissed him, saying that he had no power.

However, when President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad made a number of outrageous comments, not only were his statements taken out of context and exaggerated, it was said that he posed an existential threat to Israel and the West.

Some people are at least honest about their real motives. During the controversial election in 2009 when Ahmadinezhad was declared the winner over the reformist candidate Mir-Hoseyn Moussavi, some American neoconservatives and Israeli commentators openly said that they preferred Ahmadinezhad because they could demonize him more easily.

“Just because Moussavi is called a moderate or a reformist doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. After all he was approved by the Islamic leadership,” said Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University. “If we have Ahmadinejad, we know where we stand. If we have Moussavi we have a serpent with a nice image.” The then Mossad Chief, Meir Dagan, told a panel of Israeli lawmakers: “If the reformist candidate Moussavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem, because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat.”

Recently, the staunchly anti-Iranian lobby, The Israel Project (TIP), produced a promotional video showing the leader of the terrorist group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, denouncing the latest Iranian elections. This is despite the fact that before some right-wing pro-Israeli groups had decided to promote this terrorist group as a popular opposition group, in 2011 TIP director Josh Block had described the group as a terrorist organization. (1) Nevertheless, now his organization calls upon the same group to denounce the Iranian elections.

However, despite all this negative propaganda, the results of the latest Iranian elections exceeded all expectations. The elections set another milestone in the desire of the Iranian people for change and reform following the 2013 presidential election that resulted in the victory of the centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani.

Ever since the victory of the Islamic revolution, the government has held flawed, but competitive and relatively free and fair elections. In order to appreciate the significance of the election results, we should look at some of the obstacles that had been placed on the path of the reformists and moderates.

The right-wing Guardian Council, formed by six clerics appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and six appointed by the head of the judiciary, who is himself appointed by Khamenei, has the job of vetting all the candidates who run for high office in Iran. In the absence of organized political parties, anybody can declare himself or herself a candidate in presidential or parliamentary elections, and normally many unqualified people do so.

Therefore, there is a need for a vetting organization, but the criticism against the Guardian Council is that it does not act in a fair and impartial manner.

During the recent elections, Read the rest of this entry »

By Farhang Jahanpour

As Iran and the world powers resume nuclear talks in Vienna with the hope of reaching a comprehensive agreement over Iran’s nuclear program by mid-July, the Israelis and their lobbyists in Washington are intensifying their efforts to scuttle the talks. In addition to all the efforts in the US Congress to impose additional sanctions on Iran, thus bringing the talks to a premature end, there are indications that Israel and her friends are continuing with various acts of sabotage against Iranian nuclear facilities.

In 2010, the so-called Stuxnet virus temporarily disrupted the operation of thousands of Iranian centrifuges. At least five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated. Iran has also said that it has discovered tiny timed explosives planted on centrifuges but has disabled them before they could go off. On Monday 17 March 2014, Iran said that an alleged attempt to sabotage one of its nuclear facilities had involved foreign intelligence agencies that had tampered with imported pumps. However, in addition to all those acts of sabotage, there seems to be an intensive effort to manufacture a crisis by means of false intelligence.

Prior to the devastating Iraq war that destroyed the country and killed upwards of half a million people, not to say anything of thousands of Coalition forces who were killed and the two trillion dollars that was spent, a number of neocons bent on the invasion of Iraq manufactured various false reports in order to mislead the public and pave the way for the war.

On September 8, 2002, Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller published a story in the New York Times that openly alleged that Saddam Hussein had intensified his quest for a nuclear bomb. They wrote: “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium… Bush administration officials say the quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes is one of several signs that Mr. Hussein is seeking to revamp and accelerate Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.”

The unsuspecting public was misled by that false intelligence and the result was one of the longest and most disastrous wars in US history.

How the manufactured crisis was manufactured

In his latest groundbreaking book, entitled A Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of Iran Nuclear Scare, the historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter catalogs a long list of false reports manufactured by Israeli intelligence agencies in order to mislead the public and pave the way for a war against Iran. (1)

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