Iran Focus
London, 4 Nov – Yet again, the Iranian Regime’s personal cheerleaders have gotten their facts wrong about Donald Trump and the Iranian Regime.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) are specialists in making excuses for past and present crimes of the Iranian Regime and promises that the future will bring change but the change never comes and the lies continue in full.
NIAC research director, Reza Marashi, wrote a piece for Al-Monitor in which he claims that Trump’s latest moves against Iran may have actually aided President Hassan Rouhani.
He claimed that Trump’s decision to decertify Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal and call for sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has strengthened Rouhani’s government by uniting the Regime against the US.
However, what Marashi fails to understand is that no part of the Iranian Regime was even in favour of the US. It’s just more of the false moderates versus hardliners rhetoric that the NIAC promotes in order to get people to support the Regime.
The Iranian Regime is run by ‘supreme leader’ Ali Khamenei who refers to the US as the Great Satan, orders “Death to America” rallies, takes American citizens hostage, builds a ballistic missile programme, and openly funds terrorist proxy groups who kill US service people in the Middle East.
Marashi wrote that Rouhani and Khamenei are now united on foreign policy towards the US. This is partly true, but only because Khamenei says jump and the only acceptable answer is how high?
Rouhani is only playing a moderate. His role is to appear reasonable to the rest of the world, while carrying out Khamenei’s orders as instructed, whether that’s continuing the nuclear programme in secret, propping up the Bashar Assad dictatorship in Syria, or murdering thousands of Iranian citizens every year.
Marashi paints Rouhani like a politician who could shake up the Iranian establishment. He is the Iranian establishment. He acts like Rouhani is a progressive, filling his cabinet with marginalised voices. Rouhani imprisons dissenters and even the official Iranian prison records would back that up.
In terms of the nuclear deal, which Marashi defends by pretending that the Regime actually stuck by the deal, he notes that the Iranian people would not blame Rouhani for its failures.
This is true in a way.
As Michael Tomlinson put it on Iran Lobby: “Since they live under a repressive government that punishes contrary thinking with stiff prison sentences and quick trips to the gallows mandated by clerical courts… It’s no wonder no Iranian would openly blame Rouhani since to do so almost guarantees a prison sentence.”
