Iran - Early U.S. Support For Rioters Hints At A Larger Plan

moon   of  alabama.

In Iran - Regime Change Agents Hijack Economic Protests we looked at the developing U.S.-Israeli operation to instigate a revolt in Iran. What follows are a few more background points and a view on the developments since. A color revolution or revolt in Iran have only little chances of success. But even as the fail they can be used as pretext for additional sanctions and other anti-Iranian measures. The current incidents are thus only one part of a much larger plan.

The "western" democracies are used to distinguish political parties as left or right with fixed combinations of economic and cultural policies. The "left" is seen as preferring a social economy that benefits the larger population and as cultural liberal or progressive. The right is seen as cultural conservative with a preference for a free market economy that favors the richer segments of a nation.

The political camps in Iran are different.

The simplified version: The conservatives, or "principalists", are cultural conservative but favor economic programs that benefit the poor. Their support base are the rural people as well as the poorer segments of the city dwellers. The last Iranian president near to them was Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. One of his major policies was the implementation of cash payments to the needy as replacement of general and expensive subsidies on oil products and foodstuff. The current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani is a member of the "reformist" camp. His support base are the merchants and the richer parts of the society. He is culturally (relative) progressive but his economic polices are neoliberal. The new budget he introduced for the next year cuts back on the subsidies for the poor Ahmedinejad had introduced. It will increase prices for fuel and basic food stuff up to 30-40%.

The protests on December 28 and 29 were about these and other economic issues. Such protests have regularly occurred in Iran throughout the decades. But the current ones were soon hijacked by small groups which chanted slogans against the Iranian system and against the strong Iranian engagement in Syria and Palestine. These are not majority positions of the 80 million inhabitants of Iran:

According to the poll, 67.9% say Iran should increase backing for anti-IS groups, up from 59.8% a year ago. Meanwhile, a majority of 64.9% backs the deployment of Iranian military personnel to Syria to help the regime of Bashar al-Assad, up slightly from 62.7% a year ago.

The small groups that hijacked the protests against Rouhani's economic polices were heavily promoted by the usual suspects of U.S. influence operations. Avaaz, the RAND cooperation, Human Rights Watch and others immediately jumped onto the bandwagon. (True to form HRW's Ken Roth used a picture of a pro-government rally to illustrate the much smaller anti-government protests.) The smaller groups that hijacked and publicized the demonstration seem well coordinated. But they are far from a genuine movement or even a majority.

On the morning of December 30 large demonstrations in support of the Iranian republic were taking place in several cities. In Tehran several thousand people took part.

The self described "Iran junkie" of the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy, Suzanne Maloney, interpreted these as counter-demonstrations to the small gatherings the night before:

The Islamic Republic has a well-oiled machine for mobilizing pro-regime rallies (Rouhani himself headlined one in 1999 after student protests.) What's interesting is that it was deployed almost immediately this time.

The "Iran junkie" and "expert" did not know that yearly pro-government demonstrations are held in Iran on each 9th of Dey (Iranian calender) since 2009 and are planned well in advance. They commemorate the defeat of the CIA color revolution attempt in 2009. That attempt had followed the reelection of the president Ahmedinejad. It had used the richer segment of the Iranian society in north Tehran as its stooges. It is not yet clear what social strata, if any, this attempt is using.

In June 2009 Brookings Institute published a manual on how to overthrow the Iranian government or to take control of the country. "Iran junkie" Maloney was one of the authors. WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? - Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran (pdf) came in four parts:

• Part I - Dissuading Tehran: The Diplomatic options.
• Part II - Disarming Tehran: The Military options
• Part III - Toppling Tehran: Regime Change
• Part IV - Deterring Tehran: Containment

Part III includes:

• Chapter 6: The Velvet revolution: supporting a Popular Uprising
• Chapter 7: Inspiring an insurgency: supporting Iranian Minority and opposition Groups
• Chapter 8: The coup: supporting a Military Move against the regime

The velvet "color revolution" failed in 2009 when the "green movement" could not convince the Iranian people that it was more than a foreign supported attempt to overthrow their republic.

What we currently see in Iran is a combination of chapter 6 and 7 of the Brookings plan. Behind a somewhat popular movement that protests against the neo-liberal economic policies of the Rohani government a militant movement, as seen last night (below), is implementing an escalation strategy that could lead to a civil war. We have already seen a similar combination in Libya and at the beginning of the attack on Syria. (Tony Cartalucci at the Land Destroyer Report has written extensively on the Brookings paper as a "handbook for overthrowing nations".)

Last June the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA had set up a special operation cell for such attacks on Iran:

The Central Intelligence Agency has established an organization focused exclusively on gathering and analyzing intelligence about Iran, reflecting the Trump administration’s decision to make that country a higher priority target for American spies, according to U.S. officials.

The Iran Mission Center will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action.

Head of the new office is one of the most ruthless CIA officers:

To lead the new group, Mr. Pompeo picked a veteran intelligence officer, Michael D’Andrea, who recently oversaw the agency’s program of lethal drone strikes and has been credited by many of his peers for successes against al Qaeda in the U.S.’s long campaign against the terrorist group. 
...
Mr. D’Andrea, a former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, is known among peers as a demanding but effective manager, and a convert to Islam who works long hours. Some U.S. officials have expressed concern over what they perceive as his aggressive stance toward Iran.

D'Andrea is the CIA guy who "dropped the ball" when he could have prevented 9/11. He was intimately involved in the CIA's torture program and drone murder campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is suspected to be the brain behind the U.S. cooperation with extremist Wahhabis in Libya, Iraq and Syria.

Yesterday morning a Sunni terror group blew up a pipeline in south-west Iran near the Iraqi border:

Ansar al Furqan states that “a major oil pipeline was blown up in Omidiyeh region of occupied Ahvaz, Iran.” The group added that it had established a new unit, the Ahwaz Martyrs Brigade. The area of Ahvaz has historically had a large Arab population. However, it is unclear if this purported brigade is comprised of Iranian Arabs or Baluchis, as most of its members are thought to be Baluch. The jihadists say the “operation was conducted to inflict losses on the economy of criminal Iranian regime.”

According to the U.S. military Combating Terrorism Center, Ansar al-Fruqan has grown out of the defeated Jundallah terrorist group which had killed hundreds of Iranian officials and civilians. Jundallah was a Baluch jihadi insurgency fighting for a "Free Baluchistan" in the area of south-west Pakistan and south-east Iran. Its leader was killed in 2010 and it has since split and evolved into Ansar al-Furqan and other groups. Some of these are under foreign influence. Mark Perry reported in 2012:

A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

Mossad agents hired Jundallah terrorists to kill nuclear experts in Iran. It should not be a surprise then that a Jundallah follow-up group is now attacking Iranian economic infrastructure in the very same moment that the Mossad and the CIA coordinate another campaign to overthrow the Iranian government. This clearly points to a wider and well organized plan.

Last night groups of 20 to 50 young men appeared in some 20 cities and towns of Iran and started to vandalize (vid) the streets. They took down street demarcations and billboards, smashed windows and set fire to trashcans. Short videos of tens of incidents appeared on various Twitter accounts. The descriptions were often very exaggerated.

The "protesters burn government offices in the Ahvaz Province" video only shows the burning of a trashcan in front of a building. The only noise in the "police using live rounds on protesters" video are from the smashing of windows of an office container. A video promoted as "3 people were killed in police shooting of Lorestan" shows a small but loud group. Two people are carried away but it is unclear who they are or what, if anything, happened to them. No shooting is heard and no police can be seen. In other videos police is responding to stone throwing and vandalizing rioters.

The groups, their appearance in some 20 cities and what they did was clearly coordinated. Media promoters aggregate their videos for a larger public. The Iranian government asked the message application Telegram, widely used in Iran, to take down a channel that urged demonstrators to throw Molotov cocktails at official buildings. The head of the Telegramservice agreed that such calls are against its Terms of Services and took the channel down. New channels with similar messages immediately sprang up. The Iranian government will have to completely block Telegramor infiltrate those Telegram channels to disrupt such coordination of militant activities.

Those U.S. politicians who had called to "bomb, bomb, bomb" Iran (John McCain) or had threatened to wage war against it (Hillary Clinton) issuedstatements in support of the "Iranian people"- i.e. the rioters in the streets. These are the same people who suffocate the Iranian people by pushing sanction round after sanction round onto them - hypocrites. Donald Trump and his State Department issued statements in support of the 'peaceful protesters' who vandalized their cities throughout the country and demanded that "the regime respect their basic human rights." The professed concerns for the Iranian people are nonsense. A recently leaked memo advised U.S. Secretary of State Tillerson:

... that the U.S. should use human rights as a club against its adversaries, like Iran, China and North Korea, while giving a pass to repressive allies like the Philippines, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The official U.S. uttering comes very early and is detrimental to any real movement in Iran. It obviously exposes these protests as U.S. supported and thereby kills off their chance to win a wider base in Iran.

Why is the U.S. doing this?

The plan may well be not to immediately overthrow the Iranian government, but to instigate a sharp reaction by the Iranian government against the militant operations in its country.

And here's the thing: whatever the USG does or doesn't say about these protests, the reality is (as @POTUS tweeted) that the world is watching what happens in Iran. How Tehran responds to the current protests will shape its relationship w/the world, just as it did in 2009.

That reaction can then be used to implement wider and stricter sanctions against Iran especially from Europe. These would be another building block of a larger plan to suffocate the country and as an additional step on a larger escalation ladder.

Posted by b on December 31, 2017 at 09:06 AM | Permalink

www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/iran-early-us-support-for-rioters-hints-at-a-larger-plan.html

Why Ahed Tamimi’s slap is so thrilling to Palestinians Hatim Kanaaneh

Hatim Kanaaneh

Bassem Tamimi, Ahed’s father, has written: “I’m proud of my daughter. She is a freedom fighter who, in the coming years, will lead the resistance to Israeli rule.” From across the globe where I return annually with my wife to her native Hawaii, I hereby second Bassem’s assertion and propose to give it further formal international recognition by adopting Ahed as the poster child of the most significant Palestinian peaceful resistance movement, that of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS.) This assigns a role for Ahed not only in the struggle against occupation but against Israel’s triple moral crime of the occupation, of exiling the Palestinian refugees and of denying its Palestinian citizens equality under its laws, all infractions of accepted provisions of international human rights law.

But first, here are some background explanations:

The first name of the Palestinian teen that has been so much in the international social media of late is actually a mistaken transliteration of the striking youth’s name. The correct spelling should be A’ahd beginning with the guttural a’ (a’in) of Semitic languages followed by the short vowel (a). It is a venerable old Arabic term meaning ‘promise’ or ‘covenant,’ such as the legendary mutually binding contractual agreement between Abraham and the Lord. Let us not jump to conclusions though: Arabs are the descendants of Abraham as well. They are in the habit of circumcising their boys in keeping with their side of the biblical deal.

Another light that flashes in my mind when I hear the noun ‘Ahed’ is its diminutive form of U’hda, meaning ‘guarantee’, especially that of the second Islamic Caliph, Omar ibn Al-Khattab, which he issued to the Christian (and Jewish) population of Jerusalem when their Byzantine Patriarch Sophronius submissively awarded him the key to their city. The document has become a veritable code of honorable conduct by a conqueror towards his new subjects. Nostalgic Arabs till the present time copy it in fancy calligraphy and frame and hang it proudly in their living rooms and guesthouses.

To give the sense of Omar’s nostalgic era of victorious justice and foresight, let me dwell on its ambiance and circumstantial vibe: Arab and Islamic historians recount another incident relevant to the current conflict over the holy sites in Jerusalem: Sophronius invited Omar to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Aware of the significance his followers would attach to such a step and in light of the guarantee of freedom of worship he had included in his U’hda, he made a fateful, even if magnanimous, gesture that would confound Palestinians and all Moslems till the present time: He chose to clean a space in the city’s garbage dump for his prayers. What he apparently failed to realize was that the site was that of the Jewish holiest spot on earth. The Roman forces had not only destroyed the Jewish temple but demoted the site to a refuse dump for the city.

As the repository of millennia of cumulative racial admixtures from the many invading forces to my original Canaanite substratum, including from the above-mentioned Hebrew, Roman and Arab interlopers, I bet you my last Aloha shirt that my genes have more Semitic markers than do those of Netanyahu, Lieberman and Bennett combined. I hesitate to tussle with Regev though.Despite all her display of rabid Zionism and Ashkenazi mannerisms, attitudes, and assumed identity, her Arab roots still shine through and she may well outdo me on that count. Think of the poor woman’s predicament! 

Apropos of which, let me quote Amira Hass:

After construction began on Halamish, on the lands of Nabi Saleh and other villages in 1978, an American journalist came to interview the villagers, they say. “How long have you been here,” he asked the village elder. The elder took the reporter by the sleeve and led him to the top of a hill overlooking a green, cultivated wadi. “You see the wadi, young man? When Adam and Eve were frolicking there below, we were already here.”

While on the racial origins kick, few fail to notice Ahed’s atypical Arab features, especially her in-your-face hair and intent blue eyes. The Tamimis claim descent from a Palestinian wine merchant who, on one of his trade missions to the Arabian Peninsula, befriended the prophet Mohammad, God’s prayers and peace be upon him, and was authorized by the prophet himself to look after God’s country in the environs of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in perpetuity with the property rights passing down the family line till the present day. Exactly what atypical genes he or his wife had or what admixture the line had accrued since is not recorded in the book arguing the case of the Tamimis’ land claims in Southern Palestine that I have read.

Another educated guess regarding Ahed’s name: I wager that the struggle of her village to keep defending their land and natural spring in the face of Israeli settler encroachment was at the root of her parents’ choice of her name, Ahed, a promise of struggle and an immutable faith in a just future for all Palestinians. Obviously, the child has internalized her parents’ trust and hope through sharing in their relentless daily life of resistance and struggle for survival, through their Friday peaceful demonstrations and through maintaining their identity as Palestinian farmers, as much a part of the land they defend as its stones.

Every time I watch another video of the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh’s weekly confrontations with the Israeli occupying soldiers, which has gone on every Friday for the past ten years, I find myself focusing more on the mortarless retaining walls in their fields than on the violence the occupying Israeli army visits on them. I remember the innumerable times I helped my father build such walls on our land in Galilee. I recall how much I admired his skill in fitting each individual stone in consideration of its three-dimensional configuration and weight to engage the exact geometric properties of the existing space in the developing wall and how that one stone fit to form the next expectant space in the ever-reconfiguring endless puzzle. Then comes a group of foreigners with their bulldozers and scuttles the whole centuries-old minutely-balanced hillside, does away with the accumulated labor of love of generations, dig trenches and deep wounds in the hillside face of our productive land and take over our water spring. They pull out our ancestral olives that our parents and their parents before them toiled all their lives to sustain and be sustained by them.

This is the time, perhaps, for some horse trading and negotiations: If the Israeli armed forces, the most moral army in the world as per their Hasbara claims, and their government, the only democracy in the Middle East (ditto), were to abide by the eighth century rules of U’hdat Omar, we the Palestinians would scratch off all claims to independence and a separate state. Remember though, U’hdat Omar guaranteed all residents the full protection of life and property and the free practice of their faith against the payment of tax. It can be easily stretched to fit its modern equivalent of one secular and democratic state west of the Jordan River. But remember the refugees: we have to start in 1948 and deal with the status-quo-ante of that period.

For those who are interested in further details of the phenomenon called Ahed Tamimi, here are my choices from the dozens of articles that I have read since the affair, Israel’s tsunami of shame, broke out:

Ben Ehrenreich in The Nation

Bassem Tamimi’s Op-ed in Newsweek

Lisa Goldman’s article in +972

Jonathan Ofir’s article in Mondoweiss

In conclusion, it is with elation and much expectation befitting my discovery of the obvious that I submit to the world my rationale for my proposal:

1. Like BDS, Ahed Tamimi is modern. Much of what the world knows about the two has been spread through the social and electronic news media. Ahed is a Palestinian village girl. Like many of her age mates the world over she dresses in casual western attire. What grabs the viewers’ attention is her curly thick hair and the depth of seriousness in her blue eyes. That is the very image of solemnity the Palestinian civil society’s international appeal for justice, the BDS, has managed to impart to its campaign: modern, clean cut and courageous to a fault.
2. Like BDS, Ahed Tamimi represents the whole Palestinian community and acts in their collective name. Living nearly all of my life as part of that people and experientially, intellectually and sentimentally sharing in the land that sustains them, the air they breathe, the language they speak and the dreams that inspire them, I can honestly testify that no Palestinian but feels proud of Ahed’s daring resistance, of her slapping the impudent faces of those soldiers who had invaded her home. Without exception, I wager, they want Ahed to slap the shit out of the heads of those soldiers, for that is exactly what their state has instilled in their craniums and we need to do them the favor of helping them expel it out. Likewise, I know of no Palestinian who is not proud of the BDS movement or does not stand behind its call for justice on their behalf even if some have to hide the sentiment.
3. We all are with you, Ahed, in your insistence on all three components of the just demands of the BDS. True, ending the occupation, the immediate settler colonialist incursion on your home village of Nabi Saleh and of the occupied West Bank, is only one of those demands of the BDS. Yet, your slapping of those soldiers speaks for all of us: They had slapped us in 1948 and in 1967 and innumerable times since. By slapping their faces, you are telling those aggressors to permit the return of the exiled Palestinian Refugees and to end the apartheid their state forces on us, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, under its racist exclusivist dogma of ‘the Jewish State.’
4. Ahed Tamimi’s mode of peaceful resistance is based 100% in international law. And so are the tactics and worldwide appeals of the BDS movement. The sophisticated worldwide media campaigns of both movements are fully within the frame of natural law and international sphere of action that brought down Nazism, Fascism and Apartheid.

It should be obvious by now that the combining of the above two international campaigns is natural. It is one of those win-win situations where one plus one is more than two. In fact, here we have a case of one plus one potentially yielding over seven billion conscientious nods of approval and support. Go ahead, BDSers, and adopt Ahed Tamimi as your poster child. 

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/tamimis-thrilling-palestinians/

Top 5 Signs Trump doesn’t Actually Care about Iranian Protesters

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Trump has tweeted as though he cares about the welfare of the Iranian protesters in small towns across that country who are upset about reduced government subsidies for commodities such as eggs and gasoline. His administration tried to prosecute protesters for laughing at VP Mike Pence.

The scattered rallies, mostly consisting of a few hundred people but sometimes swelling to 1,000, continued for a third day.

Here are the reasons for which these statements are hypocritical.

1. If Trump cared about Iranian dissidents, he would welcome those who want to flee to the United States. The more forthright and well known dissidents are at risk of long jail sentences or even death. Instead, Trump has tried to ban Iranians from coming to the United States at all. If he won’t let a grandmother come for her grandchild’s wedding, how much does he care about Iranians?

2. The protesters are protesting economic hardship. But Trump and the Washington Establishment were all for imposing economic hardship on the Iranian public to pressure the government to give up its nuclear fuel enrichment program. Under severe sanctions which Trump doesn’t think severe enough, some families stopped being able to afford imported medicines key to treating a family member. Some of today’s economic problems are rooted in the American deep sanctions and in the GOP Congress’s refusal to lift sanctions on Iranians after the government signed the nuclear deal.

3. Sympathizing with working people facing increased prices is not Trump’s brand, and it is rich for him to pretend to care about them. Trump with his budget law has just plunged millions of Americans living in straitened circumstances into even more dire poverty and is trying to take health care insurance away from 26 million Americans. Trump hasn’t even gotten the electricity back on for American citizens in Puerto Rico because of his racism. So if Trump were in power in Iran, the people in the streets protesting would be treated much worse than they are now.

4. The protesters are complaining about the arbitrary, high-handed and authoritarian way that the clerical regime has run Iran. Trump does not object to any of those policies in principle. He just told the New York Times that as president, he can do anything he wants and it is legal, and that he can suborn the Department of Justice. Trump also wants to outlaw abortion in order to please his base of religious evangelicals and conservative Catholics. That the Iranian clerics make policy on irrational religious grounds is one of the things people mind about them, but how is Ayatollah Trump different?

5. Trump has allied himself, and aligned himself, with the Saudi royal family, which in turn is attempting to undermine Iran. Trump is backing Saudi Arabia’s cruel and useless bombing campaign on poor little Yemen. That any Iranians would see Trump as sympathetic to them beggars belief.

https://www.juancole.com/2017/12/actually-iranian-protesters.html

History of the world at year 1 after Trump

by Hamid Dabashi

The world has endured one complete and completely calamitous year of Donald Trump, the president of the United States - "Mr President", as Americans reverentially refer to him. 

After a tumultuous and deeply divisive presidential campaign, in a free and fair general election, Americans elected a notoriously racist, consistently misogynistic, white supremacist, xenophobic, real estate charlatan as their president, entrusting him with their highest and most revered political office. He was solemnly sworn in "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" on January 20, 2017, at 9am.  

To be fair, in electing Donald Trump as their president Americans did not have much of a choice, for opposing him in the final election was a singularly corrupt corporate lackey and carpetbagger named Hillary Clinton who systematically sabotaged the campaign of the only decent American that could have been elected president - Senator Bernie Sanders.

Given their choice between Hillary Clinton and a nefarious charlatan, Americans opted for the nefarious charlatan. There are certain snakes in hell from which you run to dragons, as we say in Persian. 

The world thus nosedived into perhaps the most dangerously destructive year in its recent history. We are now living that history. We are about to finish its first year: year 1 AT (after Trump). 

We, the future historians of our present

The future historians (if Trump leaves us a future to fathom and does not cause a nuclear holocaust or an environmental calamity does not put an end to us all) ought to know that this US president wakes up early in the morning and the first thing he does is start bombarding the globe with the most inane, most imbecilic salvos of gibberish that emerge from his mental and moral indigestion.

He calls them his "tweets". What a beautiful word to abuse and waste for his blithering verbal diarrhoea - no harmless birdie ever chirped anything but joy in this world. Then he goes about issuing his racist misanthropic fatwas against one thing or another.

OPINION

Where is the mass resistance against Trump?

by Andrew Mitrovica

One day, he bans Muslims from entering the US; another day, he pulls the US out of environmental accords meant to preserve the earth; the next day, he wants to build a wall at the Mexican border because he thinks Mexicans are rapists; and the day after, he steals a whole historic city and gives it to his Zionist financiers, before, just for fun, saying Haitians "all have AIDS".

If he doesn't have anything else to do, he just tweets - a few Islamophobic videos, defends some neo-Nazi thugs, and makes a few anti-Semitic remarks. His supporters just love him for these spontaneous outbursts of his true nature. "He tells it like it is," they say.  

Trump consistently lies, systematically cheats, unabashedly insults weak and vulnerable people. He keeps up with his predecessors' habit of mass-selling arms to Arab tyrants to kill more Muslims, gives them for free to Israelis to keep killing more Palestinians and stealing their lands, and he then awards them by declaring Jerusalem their capital.

The world is scared witless of climate change. He says global warming is good to combat cold weather.

The world is aghast at the range of sexual assaults and sexual harassment perpetrated by powerful men and here he is the president of the United States, the most dangerously powerful man on planet earth, facing allegations of predatory sexual misconduct. 

We the future historians of our present must rush to anachronism to tell our posterity (if there will be a posterity) what has happened to us. 

A neo-globalist

The world looks at the United States today and shivers with outrage, with fear and trembling, aghast at the moral and political bankruptcy of a "democratic system" that results in such disgraceful insults to common human decency. This is in sharp contradistinction to what any decent American thinks of himself or herself. Trump's election has brought the majority of Americans to the bosom of humanity at large - fearing for themselves their own elected imperial officers. 

There are those among Americans who think Trump is a political isolationist or an economic nationalist. But that is not the case. Politically, he is a warmongering bully that has intensified bombing of nations and then sought to close the US borders to its catastrophic humanitarian consequences. That is not isolationism. That is amoral cowardice.

OPINION

Xi's China rising, Trump's America waning

by Richard Javad Heydarian

The same goes for his economic policies. He wishes to rob the world of its natural resources, destroy the environment, and enrich his obscenely rich political backers. That is not economic nationalism. That is highway robbery on a global scale. 

The first target of Trump's nefarious economics has been American people themselves. His monumental tax scheme that his fellow Republicans just passed will target the poorest segments of the US society to enrich the tiny upper echelon of the country. What sort of "nationalism" is that? He is a thief stealing from the poor enriching the rich even more.

What Donald Trump has staged is first and foremost the moral and political crisis that "Western democracy", in general, and American democracy, in particular, face today. All the way from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, the world has been force-fed, lectured at and politically held hostage to overdoses of highfalutin treatises about "Western liberal democracy" - the crowning achievement of which is this clinically diabolical buffoon. 

Trump is no isolationist or nationalist. He is a neo-globalist of fear and fanaticism, of thievery for the rich and destitution for the rest.  

The law of diminishing returns

A year into the Trump presidency, the global perception of common American decency has been seriously diminished, the fear of its vulgar and violent militarism increased, the brutish impact of US disregard for planetary environmental calamity intensified, nefarious US allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel given free hands to slaughter people in Yemen and Palestine with impunity, the poorest and most vulnerable segments of American society targeted for even more impoverishment, its richest pockets made even deeper and more obscenely rich.  

The world, including the majority of Americans, stand today on one side, and Donald Trump and his richest and most dangerous beneficiaries from Washington to Tel Aviv to Riyadh on the other. They are wreaking havoc across the globe and we are bracing for even worse to come. 

A shining truth emerges from this calamitous condition of humanity at year 1 AT of our world history. The world is forever freed from all its dangerous delusions: from the nativist American democracy to European liberal globalism, from the corrupt Russian oligarchy to the globalised Chinese communism, from xenophobic Zionism to megalomaniac Islamism, from homicidal Hindu fundamentalism to genocidal Buddhist nationalism. 

Free at last, as the moral voice of Martin Luther King Jr, declared, thank God Almighty we are free at last from all the false god terms of our history - just a year into the presidency of our very own Roman Emperor Mr Donald Trump, Real Estate Developer, Inc. We are freed from all delusional fantasies East and West and walk through this valley of despair with our eyes and hearts wide open, our minds and intellect clear and caring - the modest prophets of our own uncharted destinies.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/history-world-year-1-trump-171230081826670.html

Rouhani says Iranians have right to protest, slams Trump’s comments

• facebook
• twitter
• youtube
• google-plus
• instagram
• soundcloud
• coub
• vkontakt
RTQUESTION MORE

Published time: 31 Dec, 2017 18:27Edited time: 31 Dec, 2017 19:37

Get short URL

People protest in Tehran, Iran December 30, 2017 © Reuters

Iranians are free to protest and criticize Iran's government, President Hassan Rouhani has said, adding, that the protests should not descend into violence. He also blasted President Donald Trump’s comments on the protests.

"People are absolutely free to criticise the government,” the Iranian president said Sunday, commenting on the ongoing mass protests in Iran for the first time. The protests should be held in a way that would lead to the improvement of the situation in the Islamic Republic and not the other way round, he added.

Read more

2 killed in protests across Iran overnight

"Criticism is different from violence and damaging public properties,” Rouhani warned as he called on demonstrators to refrain from any disruptive behaviour. He also said dealing with the current problems that Iran is facing “would take time,” adding, the people and the government should help each other in overcoming the difficulties.

The president then chided Trump over his comments concerning the situation in Iran. The US leader earlier repeatedly accused the Islamic Republic of “corruption” and “squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad” in a series of Twitter posts.

The US has no moral right to act as if it defended the rights of Iranians because Washington itself calls them terrorists, he said. “Those, who called Iranians terrorists, have no business sympathizing with our nation,” he added, referring to Trump’s comments.

“This man in America who is sympathizing today with our people has forgotten that he called the Iranian nation terrorists a few months ago,” the president said at a government meeting, as cited by the official IRNA news agency. “This man who is against the Iranian nation to his core has no right to sympathize with Iranians," Rouhani said further, calling Trump an “ill-wisher” and that Iranians do not need his sympathy.

Trump recently went on a Twitter spree, demonizing Iran and calling on its leadership to “respect the people’s rights." He also warned that “oppressive regimes” do not “endure forever,” and that the US “is watching very closely for human rights violations!”

The US president’s comments provoked an angry reaction in Tehran, with the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry immediately slamming Trump’s remarks as an “opportunist and hypocritical” attempt to meddle in Iran’s internal affairs. Later, Iranian lawmakers accused Washington of hypocrisy by saying that it neither cares nor understand the Iranian demands.

“How can it [the US government] now claim to be defending the demands of the Iranian people?” Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, spokesman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission questioned, speaking to the Tasnim news agency. He said Washington has absolutely no right to pose as an advocate of the Iranian people’s interests, as America is largely to blame for their economic hardships because of the sanctions the US has imposed against the Islamic Republic.

Amir Abdollahian, a senior adviser to the Iranian parliament’s speaker on international affairs, also turned to Twitter, calling on Trump not to get too “excited” over the real nature of the rallies that have swept through the Islamic Republic over recent days. “Mr. Trump don't get excited. People's economic demands are different to rioters. Iranians prefer national security & religious democracy as practiced by [the] Islamic system over WH's terrorist & deceptive policies,” he said in a Twitter post.

Iran has been gripped in a wave of mass demonstrations that started Thursday as people took to the streets to first protest against soaring food prices and unemployment. The rallies then turned into the biggest anti-government movement in eight years, as the crowds then aimed their anger at the Iranian government and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The anti-government protests were countered Saturday by massive pro-government demonstrations. Rallies in support of the government were held in some 1,200 cities and towns across Iran, including the capital, Tehran and the second most populous city, Mashhad.

READ MORE: ‘West focuses only on anti-govt rallies’: Thousands protest for & against authorities in Iran

Some protests turned violent. Videos posted on social media showed protesters jostling with riot police, throwing stones, burning fires, and even hauling down a billboard of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Two people taking part in an unauthorized protest were killed in the city of Doroud (Dorud), 325 kilometers southwest of Tehran. On Sunday, Iran’s interior minister warned that “violence, fear and terror” will be dealt with firmly following the third consecutive night of unrest.