Why Rouhani Loves NY

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani takes questions from journalists during a news conference in New York

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s trip to New York next week will be a welcome relief for the Iranian leader. Finally, he’ll be somewhere where he’s appreciated, even loved.

Ahead of his trip to America, the US media continued its practice of presenting Rouhani as a moderate, and a natural ally for the US.

NBC News’ Anne Curry interviewed Rouhani in Tehran, focusing her attention on his dim view of Islamic State.

Rouhani told Curry, “From the viewpoint of the Islamic tenets and culture, killing an innocent people equals the killing of the whole humanity. And therefore, the killing and beheading of innocent people in fact is a matter of shame for them and it’s the matter of concern and sorrow for all the human and all the mankind.”

The US media and political establishment’s willingness to take Rouhani at his word when he says that he’s a moderate is one of the reasons that Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz was in such a desolate mood on Wednesday.

During a briefing with the foreign media, Steinitz described the state of negotiations between the US and its negotiating partners – Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – and Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program.

The briefing followed the latest round of the biennial Israeli-US strategic dialogue. Steinitz led the Israeli delegation to the talks, which focused on Iran, the week before nuclear talks were scheduled to be renewed.

One of Steinitz’s chief concerns was the US’s insistence that Rouhani is a moderate.

In his words, “The only thing that has changed [since Rouhani replaced president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is the tone. The only difference is that the world was unwilling to hear from Ahmadinejad and [his nuclear negotiator Saeed] Jalili, what it is willing to listen to from Rouhani and [Iranian Foreign Minister Javad] Zarif.”

Unlike the Americans, the Iranian people are through with the fiction that Rouhani is a moderate, which is why he no doubt will be happier in New York than in Tehran.

Rouhani’s trip to New York coincides with his one-year anniversary in office. Since he took power, a thousand Iranians have been executed by the regime.

Forty-five people were executed in just the past two weeks.

According to Iranian scholar Majid Rafizadeh, the public’s tolerance for regime violence has reached a breaking point.

In an article in the Frontpage Magazine online journal, Rafizadeh described how 3,000 people descended on regime executioners as they were poised to kill a youth in Mahmoudabad in northern Iran. The protest forced them to call off the show.

They murdered the young man the next day, when no one was looking.

As Iran scholar Dr. Michael Ledeen has explained, the rise in regime brutality is directly proportional to the threat it perceives from the public.

And the regime has good reason to be worried.

Anti-regime protests and strikes occur countrywide, every day.

For instance, from September 9-14, MEK, an Iranian opposition group, documented public protests against security forces and attacks on regime agents in Tehran, Zanzan, Bane, Qom, Karaj and Bandar Abbas.

These actions ran the gamut from a strike by a thousand gas workers in the Aslaviyah gas fields who protested searches of their dormitory rooms by regime agents, to two separate assaults on military vehicles in Zanzan, to youth responding violently in cities throughout the country when regime agents tried to enforce Islamic dress codes on women and girls.

Under the same Rouhani who waxed so poetically against beheadings when speaking to an overeager NBC reporter, not only have state executions have massively intensified. Public floggings, public hand amputations and other public demonstrations of regime brutality have also expanded to levels unseen in recent years.

Rouhani promised to protect women’s rights. Yet since he took office, women’s rights have been severely curtailed.

Last month, the Revolutionary Guards barred women from working as waitresses. In July, Tehran’s mayor barred women from sharing workspace with men. These moves and others like them, aimed at enforcing gender apartheid in all public places in the country, force millions of women into poverty. The official unemployment level for women is already hovering around 20 percent.

Then there are Iran’s other social ills, for instance drug addiction.

Iran has the highest level of drug addiction in the world. According to Babak Dinparast, a senior Iranian drug enforcement official, some 3.5 million Iranians, or 4.4% of the population, are drug users.

In April, Dinparast made the stunning claim that 53% of drug users are government employees.

According to the Iranian parliament’s research institute, the average productive hours of Iranian workers is 22 minutes a day.

In Transparency International’s ranking of administrative and economic corruption, Iran ranks 144th out of 177 countries.

In other words, Iran is coming apart at the seams. The people cannot stand the regime. The regime, incompetent and unwilling to tackle any of Iran’s problems, responds to the public’s outrage with massive, brutal repression.

If left to its own devices, in all likelihood, the Iranian regime would have been toppled five years ago when it falsified the results of the 2009 presidential elections, and so fomented the Green Revolution But the people of Iran didn’t bet on the regime’s ace in the hole: the Obama administration.

The same Obama administration that supported the overthrow of US allies in the war on Islamic jihad – Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – stood by the Iranian regime as it massacred its people in the streets of Iranian cities for daring to demand their freedom.

If the 2009 Green Revolution was the gravest threat the regime had faced since the 1979 revolution brought it to power, today the regime is also imperiled.

On Monday, Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was released from the hospital after undergoing prostate surgery. Several strategic analyses published since then claim that his days are numbered and that as a consequence, the regime faces a period of profound uncertainty and instability.

The Iranian people are watching all of this, and waiting.

As was the case in 2009, the disaffected Iranians, who hate their regime and want good relations with the US and the West, remain the greatest threat to the regime.

Beyond its borders, Iran is also under stress. With its Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah forces committed to Syria in defense of Bashar Assad, Iran finds its position in Iraq threatened by the rising power of Islamic State.

Yet, as happened in 2009, in the midst of this gathering storm, the Obama administration is rushing to the mullahs’ rescue, begging Iran to support US efforts to fight Islamic State, indeed claiming that securing Iran’s support and cooperation is a necessary precondition for the mission’s success.

To say that this US policy is madness is an understatement.

As Michael Weiss documented in Foreign Policy in June, Iran and its puppet, the Syrian regime, played central roles in facilitating the development and empowerment of Islamic State both in Syria and Iraq. A defector from the Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate reported in January that the regime helped form Islamic State.

First, it sprang Sunni jihadist leaders from Sednaya prison in 2011. Then, it facilitated in the creation of the armed brigades that became Islamic State.

The idea was that through Islamic State, it could tarnish the reputation of all of its opponents by claiming they were all jihadists.

US military officers with deep knowledge of Iran’s role in Iraq told Weiss that Islamic State’s leadership entered Iraq from Iran.

A key al-Qaida financier, Olimzhon Adkhamovich Sadikov, was charged in February by the US Treasury Department with “provid[ing] logistical support and funding to al-Qaida’s Iran-based network.”

US Army Col. Rick Welch, who served as the military liaison to both the Sunni tribes and the Shi’ite militia in Iraq during the 2007-2008 US military surge, told Weiss that the assessment of Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites alike was that “Iran was funding any group that would keep Iraq in chaos.”

Iran sought chaos in order to prevent the establishment of a stable Iraqi government allied with the US while incrementally establishing Iranian control over the country.

Iran’s actions in Iraq and Syria, in other words, have for the past decade been focused on expanding Iranian power at the expense of the US and the Iraqi and Syrian people.

This behavior of course is in line with Iran’s global strategy. From its support for Hamas to its control over Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, from developing a strategic alliance with Venezuela to expanding its presence throughout South and Central America, through its closely cultivated relationship with Russia, Iran’s every move involves expanding its power and influence at America’s expense.

And yet, despite this, the Obama administration has made strengthening the Iranian regime and appeasing it the centerpiece of its Middle East policy.

President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg in March that Iran is a rational actor that the US can do business with.

He said, “If you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits.”

As Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry now perceive things, Iran opposes Islamic State, and therefore it will play a supportive role in the US campaign against Islamic State. Moreover, by participating in the campaign, Iran will demonstrate its good faith and so make it possible for the US to cut a deal with the mullahs that will legitimize their illicit uranium enrichment – because really, how big a threat can a country that opposes Islamic State be? As for Iran, it sees its interest as having the US destroy Islamic State, and if possible, having the US pay Iran for the privilege of fighting Iran’s war – against the foe Iran did so much to create.

And this brings us back to Steinitz’s gloomy assessment of the talks with Iran. Steinitz warned against the growing prospect of the US caving in to Iran’s nuclear demands as a payoff for Iranian support against Islamic State.

In his words, “Some people might think, ‘Let’s clean the table, let’s close the [nuclear] file,” in order to get Iran on board against Islamic State.

Unfortunately for Steinitz, and for the rest of the world, including the US, the Obama administration seems bent on proving him right.

Today the Iranian regime is weaker than it has been since it violently repressed the Green Revolution.

And that is why Rouhani is happy to be coming to New York.

He knows that now, as then, the Obama administration will save the regime. This, even as the mullahs advance their goal of becoming the hegemons of the Middle East at the US’s expense, and completing their nuclear weapons program, which will secure the regime for decades to come, and threaten America directly.

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  • http://onfollowingchrist.wordpress.com Paul B.

    I will never forget obama abandoning the Iranian patriots in 2009. What woe America has brought on both itself and the world through its horrendous choices. No nation can survive this kind of trajectory for long.

  • Bamaguje

    With or without Obama’s support, the Mullahs days in Iran are numbered.
    They cannot hold the Iranian people hostage forever. The longer it takes, the more cataclysmic will be their fall.

    As for the assertion that Iran is behind ISIS, I find it incredulous, given that Iranian forces are currently battling the Sunni Jihadist group in Iraq.
    But then you never know with these “war is deceit” Islamists.

    With regards to Iran’s nuclear program, what is Israel waiting for?
    The Jewish nation should have since launched air strikes to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, as Caliph Obama clearly has no intention of stopping a nuclear armed Iran. It’s getting too late as Iran’s nuclear program advances.

    I understand the logistic difficulties of the long flight of Israeli jets over hostile Muslim countries to bomb Iran’s widely dispersed, deeply bunkered nuclear facilities. But if any nation can it pull it off, it’s Israel.

    • Vinegar Hill

      Two points I think you need to be concerned about. You claim that Israel should take action against Iran because you think that the latter has nuclear weapons or will soon have them. Israel has been accusing Iran regarding a nuclear programme for the last 20 odd years!! Wake up, they don’t have such a programme and there is no evidence that they are on the road to achieve one.
      Secondly, you advocate a preemptive strike against Iran. That contravines international law. You disrespect for legalities tells readers a lot about your lack of respect for lives and law and order.

      • retired22

        Hill,You are a walking/talking testimonial to our failed education system.You have been indoctrinated & believe the garbage you have deliberately been fed by the elite establishment.
        In your arrogance you marshal tons of information that you think you have,unfortunately most of it is carefully nurtured misinformation!
        If you want to give accurate comments on worldly issues first clear all of the indoctrinated mush out of your head & start looking for alternate,non-establishment sources of information!
        P.S. Please check out The Odysseus Group link.
        It is provided by John Taylor Gatto,he can be a great help on your journey to self discovery & wisdom!

        • Vinegar Hill

          Why don’t yopu reply to the points I made instead of referring to an outdated educational web page!!??

      • Virgil Hilts

        Vinegar…you WROTE : “Israel has been accusing Iran regarding a nuclear programme for the last
        20 odd years!! Wake up, they don’t have such a programme and there is no evidence that they are on the road to achieve one.”
        Horse Hockey! What are all those centrifuges for? They have been working for a long time to obtain enriched fissile materials. Beyond that, you should educate yourself regarding the requirement to achieve critical mass, the precision needed to produce something other than a ‘fizzle’ yield…the absolute need for high-speed explosives (which they have been purchasing), the ability to machine two, perfect spheres of either enriched uranium, or plutonium….
        I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that you haven’t any CLUE as to what the engineering involves.

        • Vinegar Hill

          How is it that you, VH, know beyond doubt that Iran has a nuclear bomb capacity? Not one ot the Atomic Energy inspection reports clearly states anything close to your outlandish claim.

          • SCREW SOCIALISM

            Why does Fascist Iran have factories buried deep underground?

            What’s “transparent” and open about them?

            DEATH to Fascist Iran!

            LONG LIVE PERSIA!

          • Pete

            “Indeed, the IAEA has known for years that Tehran was building an atomic weapon, but has been reluctant to say so. This has made it more difficult to create a united front against the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to world peace,” – British Daily Telegraph

        • SCREW SOCIALISM

          centrifuges are for making halal cotton candy?

      • 1Indioviejo1

        I really don’t care about Iran. Since they invaded our Embassy and took American hostages, they should pay with their lives and their country’s life. I hope some one will nuke them to extinction soon.

        • Vinegar Hill

          The world of international politics does not work like that. If that was the case I doubt very much if we would be writing comments about this article. We would all be “pushing up the daisies.”

          • 1Indioviejo1

            Remember better dead than red. It is the same with the Islamic totalitarian ideology. “Pushing up the daisies” is a lot better than being a slave.

        • 1keith1

          I certainly don’t think you should be bigoted against Iranians. I’m sure many of them feel like prisoners there.

          • 1Indioviejo1

            If they are Muslim they deserve destruction. It is no bigotry to hate your enemy. Who loves his enemy?

      • Hank Rearden

        Iran is virtually floating on a sea of oil. What legitimate need do they have for nuclear enrichment?

        Does a knife have to be sawing through your throat for you to understand what is going on?

        • Vinegar Hill

          Iran has to import at least 40% of its gasolina because of the US led economic boycott. In this respect it needs to develop an alternative energy resource. You need to do your homework regarding the Iranian development of nuclear energy.

          • Hank Rearden

            You mean they have a nuclear powered car?

    • Sara

      It doesn’t seem far fetched for Iran to have fabricated ISIS to use as a bargaining chip.

    • sandraleesmith46

      Iran backed the same Syrian “rebels”, who became ISIS, to destablize both Iraq and Syria, and bring down Assad, so they could take control over both, and it blew up in their faces too!

      • Ribbey

        The Free Syrian Army that O has decided to fund just recently signed a non-agression pact with ISIS(Assad is their common enemy) Take a bow O and congress… way to go. (sarc)

        • sandraleesmith46

          Really! The article I saw said they’ “joining forces” WITH ISIS, not just stopping fighting against them. Think they just got a “green light” signal?

          • Ribbey

            The article I read about it was on AllenbWest . com

          • sandraleesmith46

            I think it was MEMRI, a jihad watch group, that reported the alliance. Makes perfect sense in their logic:lie to get money and weapons, then turn them on us…

    • 1Indioviejo1

      I am not as optimistic as you are. A Muslim is our enemy in any shape or form.

  • Vinegar Hill

    Once again the readers are faced with an amateurish diatribe from Glick against the Obama administration in Washington.
    The writer criticises Obama for supporting the overthrow of the cruel dictatorial leaders of Libya and Egypt and criticises him for not doing the same in Iran. So what? He scored a two thirds hit rate….well done Obama!
    Glick is the first to criticise Obama for not doing enough against IS and yet when he tries to secure one of the most powerful regional states to help in the fight she moans out loud! Two faced, is a polite word to use!
    Glick contradicts herself by claiming on the one hand that Iran played a direct role in helping the IS state emerge and yet it is set on its destruction!
    She ends on a highly imaginative note insinuating that Iran will have their nuclear weapons programme and will threaten America directly! In other words it will have a complete array of ICBMs capable of carryong nuclear warheads and so forth and so on!! All at the stroke of a pen!

    • Virgil Hilts

      That’s a lot of rhetoric. Consider this: When a nation has, as one of its operative slogans, ‘Death To America’…SOME of the adults in the room OUGHT to be paying Attention! And…neither Kerry, nor O’Bama, nor YOU are adults…and they are NOT paying attention

      • SCREW SOCIALISM

        DEATH to Fascist Iran!

        LONG LIVE PERSIA!

      • SCREW SOCIALISM

        Crap in the mahdis well.

        Tehran and Qom and Medina and Mecca are all smaller than Israel – for starters.

    • Softly Bob

      “Once again the readers are faced with an amateurish diatribe from Glick..”

      No, they’re faced with an amateurish diatribe from a clueless individual like yourself.

  • Hard Little Machine

    Current thinking is that Iran has had a working nuclear gadget since 2012 and reached a quiet detente with Obama not to advertise it and so upset his reelection. A gadget isn’t a deployable weapon but they are about a year from finishing one. Perhaps a little less. In either case sometime in 2015 Iran will make credible yet ambiguous noises about having a nuke atop one of their missiles.

  • Joel Cairo

    One should look carefully at the contention that killing one innocent is as if the entire world had been killed. To the jihadi the only innocent is a fellow traveler. The non-believer is a criminal of the worst sort and not an innocent. That is why their deaths are mandated.

    Rouhani is hiding behind the western interpretation of the word ‘innocent’. He knows that we will not use the same meaning as he does, so he tricks the uninformed into thinking he is in agreement with them.

    • SCREW SOCIALISM

      To pigs like rouhani, Infidels are NOT innocent. Neither are the wrong kind of muslim innocent.

    • 1Indioviejo1

      Mohammed heard it from the Jews and Christians living in Arabia in the 7th Century, but abrogation did away with it. The Medina Koran is satanic, and the meccan one is irrelevant. Just sayin…

    • Hank Rearden

      Very good!

    • seewithyourowneyes

      Indeed. That’s why Islam teaches that all people are born Muslim. You do not convert to Islam; you are said to revert to Islam. All adult Infidels are therefore guilty apostates and deserving of death. Muslims congratulate themselves on their “merciful” creed that requires conquered Infidels be given a choice to revert to Islam, or to live in dhimmitude under Sharia, rather than only to face execution for their beliefs.
      Also, the “as if the entire world had been killed” verse is rather ambiguous, at least in the translation I read. The verse says that the law given to Israel equates the killing of an innocent with the killing of the entire world. And indeed there is such a verse in the Talmud. It does not say that such a law has been given to Muslims. And the very next verse gives Muslims the right to use the death penalty against any “who spread mischief in the land.”

  • Douglas Mayfield

    As a socialist and a nihilist, Obama continues to do everything he can to eradicate freedom and individual rights wherever he finds them, both here in America and around the world.

    During his administration, Obama has snubbed or actively hamstrung our allies and fervently embraced every vicious murdering tyrant he can find, including Chavez, Putin, and the foul Islam driven rulers of Iran.

    It’s no surprise that Obama would call Iran a ‘rational actor’. In Obama’s twisted lexicon, ‘rational’ means keeping your foot on your own people’s throats while murdering anyone who dares to oppose your doing so.

  • Bamaguje

    “Why doesn’t President Obama show Assad at least the same “respect” as he does for Rouhani, whose regime you consider Assad a “puppet” of?” – Alex.

    Assad is secular but Rouhani is an Islamist… and Obama bin Laden usually sides with Islamists…
    That’s why he bombed Gaddafi out of power to install Al-Qaeda linked Islamists in Libya, which is now on fire due to the willful blindness of Obama & Sarkozi.

    • 1Indioviejo1

      Assad is a criminal.

  • Bert

    In all this I am especially disgusted with the majority of my fellow Jews who are committing a monumental crime against America and Israel by their blind support of Obama. They should have been alert and warned America in 2008 about Obama and his real background. Doing so might have tipped the election to John McCain and saved America. I only wish that this criminal Jewish leadership could be put on trial and exposed for their treason – and that is not too strong a word considering the damage caused by Obama.

    • sandraleesmith46

      NO, McCain’s strings are pulled by exactly the SAME puppet masters as O’s are. We do NOT have 2 parties in the swamp, only 1: the NWO party, of which ALL are active members, as were the Bush clan, Clintons, Carter, etc. They have 1 agenda, the 1 world government. We haven’t had a non-member of this party in our WH or Congress, either house, since at least the Wilson regime!

    • Lightbringer

      The majority of our fellow Jews are not traitors, they are merely fools. Useful idiots, if you will. They often have only the sketchiest understanding of Judaism, which for them means “social justice” and “environmentalism” — two of the false gods that they have chosen, in their ignorance and foolishness, to worship. I would not be so harsh with them; it is incumbent upon us to gently and lovingly educate them wherever we have the opportunity.

  • drthomasedavis

    From Rouhani just more and more taqiyya. That’s Arabic for lying bulls**t

  • Libslayer

    Obama will do what’s worst for America and what’s best for the Islamics.
    That is his pattern.
    Obama is a taqiyya spouting Muslim.
    He’d have America under strict sharia law by now if he could.

    • Pete

      At least Michelle would be covered in a burqa.

  • sandraleesmith46

    Spot on, again, Caroline! Iran is on IRAN’S best side, and the people of Iran are in as much danger from America’s regime, who’ll stab them in the back JUST as fast as he’s done us, if they dare believe him, as from their own, which poses a threat to American people as well. Thing is, ALL the regimes are on one side, against the people!

  • sandraleesmith46

    ASssad is NOT MB, and not playing along with the NWO agenda: that’s the difference.

    • 1Indioviejo1

      He is still a criminal Muslim who must be destroyed ASAP.

      • sandraleesmith46

        A less urgent problem than many others!

  • Jack5678

    “Innocent”? The “British” cleric Chaoudry said on TV awhile back that all non muslims are not “innocent” because they commit a crime against God by not believing. So…it’s OK to kill them. More Taqiyya for the brain dead liberal leftists that are steering our country to absolute ruin.

  • 1Indioviejo1

    The US and the West are Muslim appeasers. They are having their prolonged “Munich” assessment and it will ultimately be paid in our blood. There is no good in Islam and Mohammed was a genocidal monster. If no one else will, then it falls on Little Israel to bomb Iran into the stone age and destroy their nukes. Let the world squeal like the pigs they are, but someone has to have Cojones and wisdom to do the right thing.

  • http://geoffreybritain.wordpress.com/ Geoffrey_Britain

    “Rouhani told Curry, “From the viewpoint of the Islamic tenets and culture, killing an innocent people equals the killing of the whole humanity. And therefore, the killing and beheading of innocent people in fact is a matter of shame for them and it’s the matter of concern and sorrow for all the human and all the mankind.””

    There you go, a perfect example of taqiyya, the practice of religiously approved lying. Nothing ambiguous about that lie either, it’s a straight-out falsehood and a lie because Rouhani KNOWS he’s telling an untruth directly and completely opposed to the truth. Islam commands the Muslim to kill anyone who opposes Islam and not being a Muslim is evidence of opposition, so NO ONE is innocent in the eyes of a devout, fundamentalist Muslim.

  • herb benty

    Iraq is a trap, carefully laid out by Islam. Whoever “goes in” to fix this country will be instantly surrounded . And of course Putin already warned Obama to not bomb Syria, and Erdogan has ditched NATO in favor of ISIS so that eliminates Turkey. Islam is in the middle of one of it’s favorite pastimes, lying. So….anyway, when these Islamic maniacs get their act together, the real goal awaits. Israel. And God Almighty is with Israel. That generic long-haired, robed hippie with the “The End Is Near” sign in our cities, is finally actually correct.

  • Pete

    “Since he took power, a thousand Iranians have been executed by the regime.”

    You do not have a high incarceration rate when you execute people.

    Nor do you have very many political prisoners.

    • Pete

      Since Iran has a lower incarceration rate than the U.S., it must be a better nation!
      :)