(october 2017)
The biggest scam in the Middle East: Israel's war on Iran.
In the 1980s Iran fought Saddam Hussein at the cost of about 500,000 lives
at a time when war criminal Ronald Reagan was supporting Saddam Hussein.
In the 1990s Iran fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, an Islamic group that
had seized power after US-sponsored Islamic fighters had expelled the Soviet
Union from the country. The Taliban were mainly armed and funded by US allies
(Saudi Arabia and Pakistan).
In the 2010s Iran fought ISIS and saved Iraq from complete capitulation.
Unlike US ally Saudi Arabia, Iran allows women to vote, study and drive.
Unlike US ally Saudi Arabia, Iran has democratic elections in which
the candidate who wins the most votes becomes president
(unlike in the USA).
Unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran allows any religion to be worshipped on its territory
and in fact has the second largest group of Jews in the Islamic world after Turkey. The number of Jews and Christians in Saudi Arabia is zero: only one religion is allowed. There are no synagogues and no cathedrals in Saudi Arabia: it is illegal. There are synagogues in twelve Iranian cities, including all the largest cities (Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Tabriz, Yazd, Kerman, Hamadan).
There is no comparison: any country that cares for the rule of law and for
democracy would choose Iran over Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia represents pretty much everything that Westerners discuss about intolerance,
racism, dictatorship, etc. Even slavery is still practiced in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been and still is the main sponsor of Islamic terrorism
around the world: Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS and countless other terrorist groups
were founded directly or indirectly by Saudi Arabia. And, of course, most of
the "September 11" terrorists that struck the USA in 2001 were Saudi citizens,
as was their boss Osama bin Laden.
Can you name any Iranian terrorist?
Israel routinely accuses Iran of sponsoring terrorism, and by this it means
Hezbollah, a group supported by Iran. Israel forgets to mention that the whole
world except the USA views Hezbollah as a resistance movement born out of the
September 1982 massacre in Lebanon, when Israeli-backed Christian militiamen under Elie Hobeika with the support of Israeli troops under the command of future prime minister Ariel Sharon killed more than 1,000 unarmed Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Hezbollah is a terrorist group for Israel, but routinely gets a lot of votes in
Lebanon, another country where democratic elections take place (unlike in Saudi Arabia).
Israel-friendly lobbies in the USA accuse Iran of sponsoring the civil war in
Syria and Iraq. The truth is exactly the opposite. Iran was perfectly happy
with the pro-Iranian regimes of Syria and Iraq, and had no reason to start
a civil war in either country. When ISIS appeared, Saudi Arabia and Turkey
saw a unique opportunity to upset Iran and supported ISIS with money and
weapons. If you think that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel because
a previous president (long dismissed) called for the destruction of Israel,
then certainly ISIS poses an existential threat to Iran since ISIS, a Sunny
fundamentalist group, considers Iran, a Shiite-majority country, as traitors
of the Islamic faith. ISIS wants to destroy Iran for real, whereas the story
that Iran wants to destroy Israel was mainly a propaganda theme wildly
exaggerated by Israel. When ISIS entered Iraq, Iran was the first country
to send troops against ISIS. It wasn't only to help the Iraqis, but also
to defend itself from an advancing Sunni army bent on exterminating all Shiites.
Iran's role in this civil war has been very clear: defeat ISIS. Israel's
role, on the other hand, has been at best ambiguous. Israel seemed to enjoy
the fact that Muslims got busy killing other Muslims and it seemed
to welcome the arrival of ISIS. Israel never dropped a single bomb on ISIS,
whereas it did bomb Syria and Hezbollah. This while Iran was at the forefront
of the fight against ISIS.
Saudi Arabia, of all people, accused Iran of meddling in Yemeni politics.
Yemen used to be
a country where women could vote... before Saudi Arabia started bombing it.
Saudi Arabia never asked the people of Yemen which regime their prefer: Saudi
Arabia simply decided which one they didn't like and started bombing it.
Iran has been on the side of the rebels, which, as far as we can tell, have
the support of large sections of the Yemeni population.
Iran has not bombed anything in Yemen. There are no Iranian soldiers in Yemen.
And that's for the simple reason that
it doesn't need to: the rebels seized power in a popular revolution.
Iran has consistently asked for general elections to be held in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia has responded by bombing Yemen.
Saudi Arabia has killed scores of innocents in a brutal military campaign that
is mostly reminiscent of Russia's campaign in Chechnya.
The most grotesque aspect of international politics is not that North Korea
acquired nuclear weapons, but that Israel keeps accusing Iran of illegally
trying to obtain a nuclear weapon: Israel is a country that has nuclear weapons,
and it is run by proven mass murderers like Sharon and psychos like current
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
but doesn't want to allow its neighbors the right to defend themselves from
such sinister characters.
Religious minorities are not discriminated in Iran, but they are
in Israel, a "Jewish state" (it's in the Israeli constitution) that treats
its Arab population as second-rate citizens and keeps the Palestinians of the
West Bank and Gaza into a state of apartheid. Iran has never done anything
even remotely similar.
Iran used to be
the main ally of the USA in the 1960s and 1970s before the revolution that
installed the Islamic republic. That revolution was a popular revolt against
a US puppet regime led by the Shah. The USA still has to apologize to the
Iranian people for installing that regime in a CIA-engineered coup.
What happened afterwards was legitimate defense: the USA helped Saddam
Hussein attack Iran, the USA schemed endlessly to oust the Iranian regime,
the USA boycotted Iran with economic sanctions, and so forth. It was not
Iran that funded a border war in the USA, it was not Iran that assassinated
US nuclear scientists, it was not Iran that supported Islamic dictatorships.
It was the USA and Israel that funded a border war against Iran, it was the
USA and Israel that assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, it was the USA that supported the Saudi dictatorship.
Israel has convinced the public opinion of the USA (or, better, its easily
bribable politicians) that Iran constitutes a threat for the entire world
when in fact Iran constitutes a threat mainly to Israel.
The threat is not so much military as it is economic and geopolitical.
Iran would obviously be a much more important ally than Israel, as it was
in the 1960s. Iran sits on giant oil resources, and its neighbor Iraq (also
a Shiite country like Iran) controls another big share of those resources.
Iran is located in a strategic part of the world.
Iran has fought all the enemies of the USA (Saddam Hussein, Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS).
Even during the worst times of the Khomeini rule, Iran has been and still is
the most "westernized" country in that region.
Today
Iran has also a large young Internet-savvy population with hundreds of startups.
That's what Israel and Saudi Arabia fear: not nuclear bombs but a high-tech powerhouse in their backyard.
P>
This is what truly scares Israel: that one day someone tells the public
opinion in the USA that Iran would be a much better ally than Israel.
Trump is not telling the US public an even more important thing: that Russia is not complying with a nuclear treaty. Russia has deployed nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. One wonders if his crusade against Iran, a country that has complied with its nuclear deal, could be just a way to distract the public from the fact that Russia is not complying with another nuclear deal.
P.S.
Here is a timeline of Iran's nuclear program.
In 2002 Western intelligence services discovered that Iranian scientists at a nuclear facility near Natanz were trying to enrich uranium, the first step towards an atomic bomb.
In 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a ferocious Jewish hater, was elected president of Iran, with the declared mission of wiping out Israel from the face of the Earth.
Israeli secret services (the Mossad) determined that Iran accelerated
its clandestine uranium-enrichment program and responded with a clandestine campaign to sabotage it.
In 2007 Israel's defense minister Ehud Barak began to prepare a large-scale attack on Iran, with no hope of help from the USA because George W Bush was busy with two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and didn't even want to talk about a third one in Iran.
In April 2008 British intelligence discovered the Fordow fuel-enrichment plant.
In May 2009 Netanyahu met Obama in Washington and convinced Obama that
an Israeli strike was imminent.
In 2010 the computer worm Stuxnet, developed by the USA and Israel, damaged Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and in November 2010 both the Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel's other intelligence service) reported to Netanyahu and Barak that a military campaign against Iran was unwise, but Obama didn't know this and
feeling that there was no time to waste, decided to launch
clandestine negotiations directly with Iran without informing Israel.
The negotiations began in 2012 in Oman.
However, Netanyahu had just fired the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet and replaced them with hardcore hawks, and ordered the Israeli military to prepare the strike
on Iran. The CIA was aware of this because its spy satellites detected the preparations.
Israeli intelligence discovered the secret USA-Iran meetings, and, for whatever reason, at the end of 2012 decided to stop its plan to attack Iran.
Either someone had last-minute doubts or someone decided that it was worth
to wait for the result of the USA's negotiations.
In July 2015, against Israel's objections, the USA and five other powers (Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia) signed a treaty binding Iran to stop its nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions
(the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
In 2018 both Tex Tillerson and James Mattis left the Trump administration because Trump insisted on canceling the Iranian deal that, by everybody's admission (CIA and European services), was fundamentally working.
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia were pressuring Trump to quit the Iranian deal,
and the result was the promotion of
Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, two notorious hawks on Iran.
In January 2018 the Mossad stole material from a warehouse on the outskirts of Tehran that documents Iran's clandestine nuclear program, and three months later Netanyahu boasted about it live on Israeli television. A few days later Trump announced that the USA was withdrawing from the Iranian deal.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2017 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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