The visit by the Iranian regime’s president, Hassan Rouhani, to France ended with many industrial contracts but also by a deafening silence on the issue of human rights. In response, there were many protests and speeches that condemned the Iranian regime.
U.S. citizens traveling to Iran, especially Iranian-Americans, are at a high risk of being arrested and detained in that country, the U.S. State Department warned Friday.
The official warning by the U.S. State Department seeks to “reiterate and highlight the risk of arrest and detention of U.S. citizens, particularly dual national Iranian-Americans, in Iran.”
The leader of the clerical regime, President Hassan Rouhani, arrived in Paris to a wave of protests. Rouhani is one of the most senior officials responsible for the extreme and plentiful human rights violations in Iran. The protesters were Iranians, French citizens, human rights organizations, human rights activists and French and European political figures.
At the gathering, starting at noon at Place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris, the protesters called for French officials to denounce Rouhani for his grave human rights abuses. They called for Rouhani’s policy of export of terrorism and fundamentalism and for his involvement in the destructive conflicts in the region to be acknowledged.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran on January 28, said that welcoming Hassan Rouhani to France and Italy is a mistake on the part of the western nations.
Regarding the visit by Hassan Rouhani, the President of the clerical regime, to Italy and France, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, stated that, “As a mullah, Hassan Rouhani is a defender of the ruling theocracy and has sworn allegiance to the velayat-e faqih (absolute rule of the supreme leader). Rouhani has been among the most senior officials of the religious fascism ruling Iran throughout the past 37 years and has been involved in all its atrocities. He should face justice for crimes against humanity.”
In an article published in the French daily Le Monde, writer Tahar Boumedra writes that Iran has a human rights problem that the regime refuses to acknowledge and address.
Boumedra is the author of “The human rights situation in Iran: a challenge for international law”, and is also the former director of the human rights office of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).
Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written an article for the Washington Times, and is very critical of the role the U.S. has played vis a vis Iran. Shelton uses the word “irony” to describe the U.S. Iranian relationship. Across the board, the United States has shown leniency in the face of belligerence and used half-measures to confront adversaries who define extremism in both word and deed.
By Hamid Yazdan Panah
This past week the regime in Iran resorted to one of its most tried true techniques, taking hostages in order to pursue political ends. The regime detained 10 American sailors aboard two vessels in the Persian Gulf. The soldiers were held, paraded before cameras and used for propaganda purposes before they were released. The arrest and release was cited by some in the West as a departure from the regimes past behavior, and an indication of a “new era” with respect to the recent nuclear accord, yet the political theater put on by the regime was nothing more than business as usual.
By: Simin Nouri, President of Iranian Women’s Association in France
Published in Le Huffington Post, 15 January 2016
The news has just come in at the beginning of the year: nineteen executions in Iran in the space of four days, three of which were public hangings with horrifying images published in the country’s official newspapers.
Investor’s Business Daily
BY KEN BLACKWELL
Now that we have our sailors back from Iran’s regime, it seems like we can expect economic sanctions on Tehran’s nuclear program to be lifted soon, provided Iran continues to fulfill its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The release of billions of dollars of Iran’s frozen assets was one of the centerpieces of the nuclear pact, but the agreement does not specify who will receive this money.
Writing in the Thursday edition of the Providence Journal, Former US Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy questioned the West’s notion that current President Hassan Rouhani is ‘moderate’, and that a disconnect has existed between perception and reality in the West for “more than three decades.”
Kennedy argues that, despite the illusion of the moderate Iranian president, “Rouhani is only the latest to artfully exploit this fantasy and play into a naïve, aspirational worldview among many in the West about Tehran’s behavior and intentions.”
