Benjamin Weinthal
A State Department spokesman announced Monday
that the United States and the European Union will begin offering
sanctions relief to Iran because the country “has begun to take concrete
and verifiable steps to halt its nuclear program.”
Here’s just three items over the past week that suggest that Iran’s
behavior perhaps isn’t quite worthy of State’s praise: First, the
regime-controlled Fars News published an article
on its website asserting that the U.S. government is run by Nazi space
aliens (a “US-Alien-Hitler” troika). I asked Abas Aslani, the general
director of the Fars News Agency, on Twitter if Fars believes the
content of the article. He declined to answer my queries, though he did
follow me on Twitter. In any case, the U.S. reached an interim agreement
with a regime that controls a newspaper that believes extraterrestrial
anti-Semitic fascists are in charge of the American government. (As for
the actual news, media
freedom is nonexistent in Iran. In late December, the Committee to
Protect Journalists noted that, after Turkey, the Islamic Republic has
the greatest number of imprisoned journalists.)
Second, Iran’s Western-educated foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif laid a wreath
at the grave of mass-murderer Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh, a Lebanese
terrorist, was responsible for the 1983 suicide bomb attack on the U.S.
Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans.
There has been a lot intellectual and media chatter about the
sophisticated Western posture of Zarif. It’s almost reminiscent of the
Cambodian psychopath Pol Pot’s being praised for having won a scholarship to study in France,
before murdering millions in the “killing fields” of Cambodia. And of
course there’s Iran’s strategic partner, Syrian president Bashar Assad, a
Western-educated ophthalmologist who did residency work at the Western
Eye Hospital in London: CNN reported on Monday that there is extensive photographic evidence that his regime tortured and killed 11,000 people.
During his January trip to Tehran , the former United Kingdom foreign secretary Jack Straw boasted, “There
are more American Ph.D.s in Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet
than there are in U.S. president Barack Obama’s cabinet.” Straw is a big
fan of Iran’s totalitarian regime, so unsurprisingly, what was
conspicuously absent from his euphoric embrace of Rouhani’s cabinet was
any mention of the Iranian justice minister, Mullah Mostafa Pour
Mohammadi, who massacred thousands of political prisoners in 1988.
Straw’s long-term memory also did not register the past work
of Rouhani’s new defense minister, Hossein Dehghan, who played a critical role in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks.
Third, Rouhani tweeted the other day, “Geneva deal means the
surrender of big powers before the great nation of Iran” (he eventually
deleted the tweet). White House spokesman Jay Carney chalked up
Rouhani’s bragging as playing to his “domestic audience, and added,”It
does not matter what they say, it matters what they do.”
Putting aside the flaws of the interim
nuclear agreement, the mainstreaming of Tehran’s thuggish regime is
disturbing. Last week, Andy McCarthy highlighted in this space the hanging spree that’s been unfolding on Rouhani’s
watch, without any semblance of due process. Meanwhile, the Obama
administration has made no forceful effort to secure the release of
three Americans in Iranian captivity. That might be worth addressing
before we welcome Iran back to the community of nations.
— Benjamin Weinthal is a Berlin-based
fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow Benjamin on
Twitter @BenWeinthal.
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