Thursday, July 14, 2016
Iranian dissidents call for regime change
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Iranian dissidents
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LE BOURGET, France — Tens of thousands of supporters of a
dissident Iranian opposition group filled a vast convention hall here over the
weekend to call for the downfall of Iran’s theocratic
government.
The massive and boisterous event, which occurs
annually in this town just north of Paris, was led by the
controversial National Council of Resistance of Iran, a France-based
umbrella group for Iranian exiles that brought dozens of former U.S., European
and Middle Eastern officials together to speak out on its behalf.
A bipartisan clutch of Americans, including
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former FBI
Director Louis Freeh and a host of others was on hand.
But perhaps the most eye-opening speech came
from a key figure of the Saudi royal family, whose posture towardIran’s leadership has
grown increasingly tense during the year since world powers put in place a
major nuclear accord with the Islamic republic.
Prince Turki bin Faisal Al-Saud, the former
longtime Saudi intelligence chief, drew loud cheers and applause from the
Iranian dissident crowd when he exclaimed that he too wants the government in Tehran to be
overthrown and that their “fight against the regime will reach its goal sooner
or later.”
In a sign that Arab frustration toward Tehran reaches far
beyond Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki was preceded on stage by a delegation of
several other former and current officials from 12 Arab nations — all of whom
also voiced support for the plight of the National
Council of Resistance of Iran.
Yet the most vitriolic remarks at the rally,
which occurred Saturday, came from the American delegation, which included
former governors Bill Richardson and Tom Ridge, former George W. Bush
administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton — and included a presentation of
video statements from several current members of Congress.
Mr. Gingrich stoked the crowd by lamenting the Obama
administration-backed nuclear deal. The accord went into effect a
year ago this week and saw many economic sanctions on Iran lifted in exchange
for an agreement by Tehranto
curtail its long-disputed nuclear program.
The “dictatorship” in Iran “cannot be
trusted,” Mr. Gingrich said, adding that “the agreement made with it is
insane.”
Mr. Bolton went even
further. “There is only one answer here: to support legitimate opposition
groups that favor overthrowing the military theocratic dictatorship in Tehran,” he said. “Let me
be very clear: It should be the declared policy of the United States of America
and all its friends to do just that at the earliest opportunity.”
Both men appeared on stage with Mr.
Richardson, a Democrat, who said he was “proud to be here with Speaker Gingrich
and Ambassador Bolton,” and told the crowd that American “Democrats and
Republicans are together here fighting with you.”
All three were flanked by multiple movie
screen-size displays carrying the slogan: “Free Iran. Our Pledge: Regime
Change.”
Saturday’s rally was a marathon that included
more than nine hours of speeches and musical performances. The National
Council of Resistance of Iran has come to be known during more
recent years as perhaps the only dissent group on the planet with enough money
and political juice to rally tens of thousands of supporters in the heart of
Europe each June behind a collective call for the overthrow of Iran’s Shiite Islamist
government.
No one disputes that the National Council has
influence — some even describe it as the largest Iranian dissident group in the
world. But the organization’s persistence and tactics have given it a
double-edged reputation even among some of Iran’s Western critics.
National Council leader Maryam Rajavi
headlined Saturday’s rally with a demand that Washington abandon the Iranian
nuclear accord and take a far more aggressive posture toward Tehran.
Mrs. Rajavi has led the movement since its
founder — her husband, Massoud Rajavi — went into hiding in 2003. In an email
interview ahead of the rally, she said participants “represent the voice of
millions of Iranians who are being oppressed in their country and who seek
regime change and the establishment of a democratic, pluralist and non-nuclear
government based on the separation of religion and state.”
“Their expectation of the next U.S. president,
as with other Western leaders, is to abandon the policy of appeasement, which
emboldens the Tehran regime
to intensify the suppression of the Iranian people while continuing the policy
of exporting terrorism to the region,” she said.
She also referred broadly to a “resistance”
movement that she claimed has grown inside Iran during recent
years even as the government has cracked down on opposition.
“Despite the intensification of the
suppression over the past couple of years, we have witnessed a growing interest
among the Iranian people, especially women and youth, toward the Iranian
Resistance,” Mrs. Rajavi said. “The opposition to the regime is expanding. The
Resistance’s network inside Iran is much more
active in terms of organizing strikes, protests, sit-ins and other protest acts
inside the country and even inside prisons. The Resistance has had numerous
achievements in this regard.”
She also pushed back against characterizations
of the National Council and its various affiliate organizations as acting like
a cult.
“The source of these allegations is the
Iranian regime’s intelligence ministry,” she said. “The regime’s lobbies in the
West paint the Iranian opposition as a ‘cult’ or ‘terrorist group’ lacking
popular support. By doing so, they want to perpetuate the notion that there is
no other alternative for Iran except dealing
with the ruling religious dictatorship.
“I have said repeatedly that we are not
fighting to obtain power in Iran,” Mrs. Rajavi said.
“We are not even fighting for a share of power. We are fighting to create a
situation where the people of Iran are able to
freely elect the people they choose. I and our movement will certainly support
anyone who is elected through the ballot box in the course of free and fair
elections monitored internationally.”
On a separate front, the National Council
leader said that state political freedom and human rights have only worsened in Iran since the inking
of last year’s nuclear deal.
“The pace of
executions has intensified,” she said.
While the Obama administration lifted many
economic sanctions on Iran under
last year’s nuclear accord, the State Department has continued to list the
nation as a state sponsor of terrorism, and international sanctions remain on
the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
But Mrs. Rajavi suggested the remaining
sanctions were irrelevant.
She criticized, for instance, the prospective
agreement that has made headlines recently between Boeing and the government in Tehran, asserting that if
the deal goes through, planes made by the American aerospace giant “will
directly or indirectly be used by the IRGC” and “will facilitate the regime’s
activities for sending forces and arms to Syria and other countries in the
region.”
• This article is excerpted from a staff report
that appeared in The Washington Times on July 11, 2016.http://bit.ly/29y5Czm http://bit.ly/29RWx58,
Victory Star: ‘We in the Muslim worldstand with you, heart and s...
Victory Star: ‘We in the Muslim worldstand with you, heart and s...: ‘We in the Muslim world stand with you, heart and soul’ Maryam_Rajavi http://bit.ly/29Abgwa Thank you for inviting me to speak to yo...
‘We in the Muslim world stand with you, heart and soul’
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| Maryam_Rajavihttp://bit.ly/29Abgwa |
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you
today. There is a tradition that states that the Prophet Muhammad, (PBUH), once
gestured towards his Persian companion Salman and said, “Even if faith were
near the Pleiades, men from among the Persians would attain it.”
This tradition points to a few fundamental
truths about Persian history and identity. In the pre-Islamic world, the
Persian Sassanian Empire extended from Turkey and Egypt in the west to the
Indian subcontinent in the east; it was a cultural and political force rivaling
that of ancient China, India or Rome.
Eventually, the Persians embraced Islam; the
Persian language adopted its own version of the Arabic script and borrowed
heavily from Arabic vocabulary. The Persians of greater Khorasan, the name that
the Arabs took to designate the geographic area that includes present-day Iran, Uzbekistan,
Afghanistan and Tajikistan, were a key factor in the development of the
politics of the Islamic Umma and became an important component in another
Golden Age alongside the Arabs; one with far more geographic breadth and
cultural diversity than before.
As Europe struggled in its Dark Ages, Khorasan
produced some of the Islamic world’s most famous scientists, mathematicians,
theologians and poets. Al-Ghazali, the theologian, scholar and mystic often
referred to as one of the most important Muslims after the Prophet Muhammad’s
(PBUH) companions, was from a city near Mashhad. The legendary polymath
Avicenna (Ibn Sina,) the greatest scientist and medical scholar of his age, the
author of over 400 texts and a master of the Greco-Roman and Indian scholarly
traditions, made time to compose poetry in his native Persian.
But even in the cosmopolitan Islamic Golden Age,
alongside Arabs, Turks and others, Persian culture held some nostalgia for the
purity and power of their own history. The poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or Book
of Kings, an epic of Persian legends and history from the dawn of time until
Islam, was written around the year 1000 AD. As he wrote the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi
was careful to avoid Arabic influence on his vocabulary — he wanted a Persian
epic to be represented in undiluted Persian prose.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which
installed the powerful yet polarizing Khomeini as Supreme Leader, was a new and
vastly different articulation of Iranian identity.
Khomeini’s claim to rule was based on his
interpretation of the concept of vilayet-i faqih, the “guardianship of the
jurists,” a Shi’ite doctrine articulated in the late 19th century in face of a
perceived increasing Europeanization of the Iranian imperial elites, which gave
varying degrees of civil authority to religious scholars trained in Shi’ite
Islamic law as opposed to the westernized imperial administrators and imperial
family.
Of course, despite this isolationist and
interventionist foreign policy, the first and foremost victims of Khomeinism
have been the Iranian people themselves — not only the political activists
opposed to his all-encompassing, authoritarian and totalitarian ideology, but
also to the ethnic and religious minorities of Kurds, Arabs, Azaris, Turkmans,
Baloch, Sunnis, Ismailis, Bahais, Christians and Jews of Iran against the
clerical Twelver religio-political elite of the Revolution.
Today, the lofty beauty of the Pleiades can
seem very far indeed from the reality of daily life in Iran. The country is
marked not by worldliness or even by religion but by isolation; in contrast to
the travelling artists of the Sassanians and the multilingual scholars of the
Islamic Golden Age, many famous and well-respected Iranian artists today have
trouble even getting on a plane to another country.
Iranian policies under
the Khomeinist regime since 1979 are constitutionally based on the principle of
exporting the revolution, violating the sovereignty of countries in the name of
“supporting vulnerable and helpless people.” This has been the case over the
years in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, relying on the Khomeinist
regime’s support of terrorism through the provision of safe havens in its
country, planting terrorist cells in a number of Arab countries and even being
involved in terrorist bombings and the assassinations of opponents abroad.
Be it in Morocco, Egypt, Palestine or even
amongst Iraqi Shi’ites and Syrian Alawites themselves, Iranian interference is
increasingly despised for the ruin it perpetuates and requires to be useful for
the regime in Tehran. Elsewhere, the regime has supported groups from Sudanese
Islamists, to the Japanese Red Army, the sectarian armed militias of the Iraqi
Dawah Party, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, Lebanese
Hezbollah, Hamas in Palestine and Islamic Jihad in Israel, the global
organization of Al-Qaida and the Hizballah in the Hijaz — all for the purpose
of destabilizing Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, so as to assist sectarian
and revolutionary militants in these countries to replace the existing
governments with proxies and puppets of the Khomeinist regime.
Khomeini wore the black turban that signified
his pride in his long and noble Arab lineage. Today Khamenei and even Nasrallah
wear it also. But the Iranian leadership’s meddling in Arab countries is
backfiring. The recent popular protests in all Iraqi cities, from Basra, where
the Shi’ah make up the majority, to Kirkuk, where they don’t, carried banners
saying and they chanted: Iran, get out. Just this
week, popular demonstrations in Abadan chanted, leave Syria.
In conclusion, the Islamic conversation is
richer with the Iranian voice in it — likewise, the Muslim world too benefits
from a strong, proud and influential Iranian presence; however, their approach
must be one of mutual cooperation, exchange, and respect — as has proven
necessary in all epochs of history with a strong Middle Eastern world.
The Khomeinist regime has brought only
destruction, sectarianism, conflict and bloodshed — not only to their own
people in Iran,
but across the Middle East. The people of Iran should no longer
suffer this humiliation. Khamenei and Rouhani believe that if they fix their
relationship with the big Satan, their problems will be solved. They should pay
heed to fixing their relationship with the Iranian people.
And you, Ladies and Gentlemen, your legitimate
struggle against the Khomeinist regime will achieve its goal, sooner rather
than later. The uprisings in various parts of Iran have ignited,
and we in the Muslim world stand with you, heart and soul. We support you, and
we pray to God that He guide your steps so that all components of the people of Iranget their rights.
And you, Maryam Rajavi, your endeavor to rid
your people of the Khomeinist cancer is an historic epic that, like the
Shahnameh, will remain inscribed in the annals of History.
• The above are excerpts from Asharq
al-Awsat, July 9, 2016.
http://bit.ly/29Ql1dj ،http://bit.ly/29Abgwa،http://bit.ly/29RWx58،
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