Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

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Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

It seems that the “echo chamber” created by members of the Obama administration and the Iran lobby is still alive and kicking and trying desperately to keep support flowing to the Iranian regime in light of increasing calls to get tough on Iranian regime because of its continued support for terrorism, brutal human rights abuses and flagrant violations of international sanctions with ballistic missile launches.

The Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, has been especially busy making excuses every time Iran hangs a dissident, puts down a protest or sentences a dual national to prison.

Many of those “experts” sympathetic to the regime and preserving the nuclear deal at all costs continue to push false narratives like a used car salesman pushing a clunker with a rolled back odometer.

One example is a piece authored by Jeffrey A. Sinclair in Foreign Affairs in which he argues that President Trump needs to strengthen Iran’s “moderates.”

“The goal should be to guard against any further escalation of hostilities. After all, unless the administration is willing to wage war with Iran, this confrontation won’t achieve anything useful for the United States. What it will do is further strengthen the hardliners in Tehran, a process that is already underway, and undermine moderates such as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif less than three months before Iran’s presidential election,” Sinclair writes.

Rarely has a paragraph been loaded with more inaccuracies than that one.

First of all, Trump has made it clear with his criticisms of the war in Iraq during the campaign that he is not in favor of nation-building by military force, but he has also made clear he was not going to offer a blank check to regimes such as Iran and Syria to do whatever they wanted since the end result of those kinds of actions has brought chaos to the Middle East.

Trump has laid out a belief that ignoring Iranian regimes’s militant actions does little to ensure regional stability and peace. Confronting the regime on issues such as human rights, proxy wars or provocative military acts are the right policy if Trump’s administration takes up that road, but saying that such a path only leads to war is one of the boldest falsehoods of the echo chamber.

Trump has at his disposal of plethora of tools, many used successfully by previous administrations, to force Iran to the bargaining table which is exactly what happened recently. The only problem was that the Obama administration fumbled the ball by caving in to every demand the Iranian mullahs had and getting little in return.

Contrary to Sinclair’s missives, confronting Iranian regime is exactly the right course of action since to do nothing except issue paper condemnations does nothing to rectify the situation. Using harsh language as Iran’s Quds Forces supply Houthi rebels in Yemen with arms so they can destabilize the country and risk a regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran breaking out is not only bad foreign policy, it’s stupid.

Also, when Sinclair calls Rouhani and Zarif “moderates” the only polite thing to do is to keep from laughing hysterically out loud.

The only real moderates in Iran sit in Iranian prisons or have been driving out of the country as political refugees. As a religious theocracy, Iran’s mullahs maintain an iron grip on power. Rouhani did not become president to push a liberalizing agenda for reform. He was hand selected by Ali Khamenei to present the West with a more benign face in order to trigger negotiations to ease crippling sanctions.

The world is not going to see any competition during these upcoming presidential elections in Iran. Nothing is left to chance by the mullahs, which is why the vast majority of political dissidents, journalists, artists, filmmakers, students and anyone else stepping out of line has already been rounded up in advance of the elections.

“Because other U.S. and Western sanctions relating to Iran’s alleged terrorist activities remained in place, and because international banks remained highly skittish when it came to dealing with Iran, economic relief did not come quickly enough,” Sinclair said. “Overall, the administration made too few efforts to help Iran economically, as other terrorism-related sanctions were kept in place. The Obama team, it seemed, had taken its eye off the ball. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and others knew that Iranian moderates needed a post-deal economic boost to secure their position.”

This is another fallacious argument being made that the U.S. somehow was responsible for jumpstarting an Iranian economy that ranks almost dead last in the world in transparency and corruption. Also, since sanctions related to terrorism were not part of the nuclear deal, the U.S. and Trump are under no obligation to lift them, especially since Iranian regime regularly supports terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Shiite militias responsible for wholesale slaughter of Sunni villages in Iraq.

Sinclair also criticizes discussions to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization and contends such a move would “escalate tensions.”

It’s hard to imagine how much worse tensions can get when Iranian regime’s navy detains American sailors, American citizens are being held in Iranian prisons and Iran’s proxies are causing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Sinclair—and the rest of the Iran lobby—seems to place its collective hopes on the few wispy strands of less intensive anti-American actions than in the past as positive signs for change.

“For now, signs from Iran are somewhat positive. The yearly celebration of the founding of the Islamic Republic (expected to be a bonanza for the hardliners) turned out to be muted—excessively so, which was a clear sign of at least momentary moderation from the top leadership,” he writes. “In addition, a series of prominent hardliner clerics—including some of the leading clerics in Qom—have in recent days publicly expressed their support for keeping the nuclear deal in place.”

The claimed positive step is at a time that the Iranian regime test fired another Ballistic missile during this period and of course the mullahs are going to express support for the nuclear deal since its amounts to a giant ATM card the regime has been using to buy billions of dollars in new weapons from Russia.

These are not encouraging signs no matter what the echo chamber says and it’s about time we ignore it.

Michael Tomlinson

Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby Extends to Criticizing Trump Speech to Congress

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Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby Extends to Criticizing Trump Speech to Congress

Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby Extends to Criticizing Trump Speech to Congress

There is no doubt that President Donald Trump is a polarizing figure and has become a lightning rod for criticism for everything ranging from his affinity for tweeting to his policies such as his roll back of regulations and imposition of a temporary moratorium on visas from several countries in the Middle East.

The jury is still out on much of his agenda since he has yet to collaborate with Congress to bring forth specific legislative proposals, but that has not stopped the torrent of criticism being directed at him by the Iran lobby as it works to oppose anything that might be perceived as upsetting the goals and plans of the mullahs in Tehran.

This was true when Iran lobby advocates such as the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi blasted Trump’s decision to impose fresh sanctions on members of the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps for its support for ballistic missile launches that violated United Nations sanctions.

It has also been true of the Iran lobby’s efforts to deflect attention away from the Iran regime’s litany of problems at home with increasing mass demonstration and protests to issues abroad as it encounters growing calls for resistance amongst its Sunni neighbors such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States; alarmed at the turmoil surrounding them caused by the Iranian regime.

The Iran lobby has been particularly focused on the debate over Trump’s immigration policies leveraging it to its advantage to raise funds and maintain its ties to progressive Democratic groups that it previously aligned with in the efforts to support the Iran nuclear deal.

The reasons for these efforts are simple: In a post-Obama world, the Iran lobby is desperately trying to stay relevant.

Since the electoral sweep that not only saw Trump elected, but also radically changed the complexion of the Congress, the Iran lobby has been on the defensive ever since. It has found little support within the much-vaunted “echo chamber” of support previously cobbled together to help push for negotiations with the regime.

Iranian regime’s ever growing militant actions in launching ballistic missiles, supplying proxy wars in Yemen and Syria and flexing its military muscle in expansive war games have proven to be almost impossible for the Iran lobby to defend.

Predictably, after President Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress, the NIAC’s Jamal Abdi sent out a statement criticizing the speech, but in his criticism he revealed the bias and hypocrisy of the NIAC and the Iran lobby.

Abdi makes the claim that “no Iranian has ever been implicated in a terrorism-related death inside America,” which is a convenient distinction since it ignores the fact that the Iranian regime has been directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and in IED attacks throughout the Iraqi war.

In each case, Iranian regime controlled, supplied, participated or directed the attacks directly resulting in the deaths of Americans. In fact, several court decisions have held the Iranian regime responsible for these deaths and injuries and confiscated financial assets of the regime as part of court settlements to the victims and their families.

Abdi also fails to mention the violence fueled by the Iranian regime’s efforts to export its brand of extremist Islamic vision that has sparked sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites all across the Middle East, including the Syrian civil war, the Houthi coup attempt in Yemen and the expansion of ISIS arising out of the dissolution of the coalition government in Iraq.

All of these debacles were fueled by the Iranian regime and have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and Abdi and his colleagues have remained stonily silent.

But the hypocrisy of criticizing Trump’s policies while ignoring the much harsher realities of the regime’s policies echoes the same treatment given by regime foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who lauded the protest by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi who won the Oscar for best foreign film against Trump’s immigration policies, yet at the same time did not acknowledge the regime’s imprisonment and torture of several prominent Iranian filmmakers for engaging in acts against the Islamic state.

The rank hypocrisy of the Iranian regime and Iran lobby was taken to task by prominent journalists such as CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Human Rights Watch.

“Farhadi’s movie deserves the praise it has received – and much more. Iranian cinema has a long-established and well-earned reputation for providing a powerful, nuanced perspective into Iranian society,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director for Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division in an editorial. “Yet while Iranian officials bask in pride on the international stage, their rhetorical support does not translate into respect for filmmakers at home, where they have harassed and jailed movie directors and other artists for work they find displeasing.”

“In the aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections, authorities arrested Jafar Panahi, a prominent director, for allegedly attempting to make a movie about protests that followed the vote. In December 2010, Tehran’s revolutionary court sentenced Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on all his artistic activities. Following international outcry, the government did not execute Panahi’s sentence but kept the ban in place, forcing him to make movies without an official permit,” Whitson added.

“These filmmakers could serve as powerful messengers for the diversity and talent in Iran today. But until the authorities stop censoring and imprisoning them, they put into question the Iranian government’s expressed commitment to supporting the country’s millennia of “culture & civilization,” she warned.

Michael Tomlinson

 

Academy Awards Shocker Came From Iran Regime Comments Not Best Picture Gaffe

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Academy Awards Shocker Came From Iran Regime Comments Not Best Picture Gaffe

Academy Awards Shocker Came From Iran Regime Comments Not Best Picture Gaffe

Pretty much the entire planet has seen or heard about the mistaken Best Picture announcement for “La La Land” only to find out that “Moonlight” had indeed won instead in a mistake that put Steve Harvey’s mistaken Miss Universe crowning to shame.

Aside from the stunned faces of the audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, the moment became an instant viral sensation as social media buzzed about the historic mistake, but the real shocker came a day later when the Iranian regime’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif lauded comments made by the cast and crew of the film “The Salesman” which won an Oscar for best foreign film critical of the Trump administration’s immigration visa moratorium.

Zarif tweeted out his own congratulations for the statement read for Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi who chose to stay away from the 89th Annual Academy Awards ceremony in protest over President Trump’s travel ban.

“Proud of cast & crew of ‘The Salesman’ for Oscar & stance against #MuslimBan. Iranians have represented culture & civilization for millennia,” said Zarif’s tweet.

Zarif’s tweet was met by a blistering series of responses from CNN anchor Jake Tapper who took Zarif to task for lauding an Iranian filmmaker while the regime regularly imprisons other dissident Iranian filmmakers.

On Monday, Tapper tweeted how Iran has treated filmmakers in the past, which included long jail sentences and not being permitted to leave the country for decades, according to the Daily Caller.

Tapper went on to list several prominent Iranian filmmakers who are languishing in regime prisons.

“2/Iran regularly jails its filmmakers. Such as Keywan Karimi guilty of ‘insulting sanctities’ in October 2015,” he tweeted.

“3/Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to make an ‘antiregime’ documentary,” he continued.

“4/Documentary filmmaker/women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi was jailed for collaborating with the BBC,” he added.

“5/ Musician Mehdi Rajabjan and filmmaker Hossein Rajabian were jailed for “insulting Islamic sanctities,” he tweeted.

“6/ So FM @JZarif? The traditions of your brilliant people are being oppressed by the tyranny of your government. Tweets notwithstanding,” Tapper concluded.

Tapper correctly points out the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime when it lauds comments that support its propaganda efforts, and yet deals harshly with anyone caught criticizing the regime of stepping outside of approved cultural or moral norms.

All of which makes comments made by top mullah Ali Khamenei earlier this month even more interesting when seen in the light of Zarif’s tweets.

In a speech in the East Azerbaijan region of Iran, Khamenei said that a war on Iran’s culture and economy is more dangerous to his Islamic regime than any military threat from the West, according to Breitbart News.

“A European official said to our officials that a war in Iran would have been inevitable if it had not been for the Bar-Jaam,” Khamenei said, referring to the nuclear agreement brokered by the Obama administration and Western allies. “That official said that if the Bar-Jaam had not been signed, the war would have been definite.”

“This is a blatant lie!” Khamenei said in the speech. “Why do they speak about war? They do so because they want to switch our minds to a military war, but the real war is something else.”

“The real war is an economic war, the real war is the war of sanctions, the real war is the arenas of work, activity, and technology inside the country,” Khamenei said. “This is the real war!”

“They draw our attention to a military war so that we ignore this war,” Khamenei said. “The real war is a cultural war.

“There are so many television and internet networks which are busy diverting the hearts and minds of our youth away from religion, our sacred beliefs, morality, modesty and the like,” Khamenei said.

In this regard Khamenei is correct since what the mullahs abhor more than anything else is free and independent thinking it seems. Free expression and divergent opinion is met with a fury from the mullahs akin to a full scale invasion; except for the ruling mullahs an invasion of ideas seems to be more dangerous than U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Iran.

This also explains why the regime has always been especially brutal in its crackdowns of artists, journalists, bloggers and filmmakers as a means of controlling public discourse and the flow of creativity among the Iranian people.

It also explains why the regime has worked so hard at restricting access to social media platforms and web sites judged to have anti-regime materials on it.

Inevitably though, the slow creep of the arts have proven to be a strong antidote to totalitarian thinking and we can only hope that the Academy Awards will one day be celebrating the work of an Iranian filmmaker who know sits in prison.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Regime Continues to Ramp up Tensions with Naval War Games

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Iran Regime Continues to Ramp up Tensions with Naval War Games

Iran Regime Continues to Ramp up Tensions with Naval War Games

The Iranian regime has been busy lately playing at war games with the gusto of a 10-year-old boy with his new toys. After going on a multi-billion dollar shopping spree using cash provided courtesy of the U.S. for the release of American hostages and as a result of lifting economic sanctions with the nuclear agreement, the mullahs in Tehran have been busy showing off their new toys.

This has included test firing new ballistic missiles, launching new Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles, flying new aerial drones and sailing new ships designed to launch small ship raids against larger warships such as the U.S. Navy.

The Iranian regime has also been busy resupplying Houthi rebels in Yemen with smuggled shipments of rockets, mortar rounds, ammunition and guns. It has also been sending a steady stream of fighters culled from Afghan mercenaries, Shiite militias in Iraq and its own Quds Forces and Revolutionary Guard Corps to fight in Syria.

Meanwhile its navy has been busy flitting about the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to run aggressively at U.S. Navy warships in an attempt to intimidate and possibly cause an incident on the high seas.

This sort of action continued with the launch of a series of war games both on the ground and at sea. The regime just completed three days of war games and launched another series of war games; these to be conducted in a massive area stretching 772,000 square miles from the Strait of Hormuz, the Sea of Oman, through the Indian Ocean and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

Announcing the exercise on Sunday, regime Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said: “The aim of the Velayat 95 drill is to upgrade the country’s defensive capabilities and send Iran’s message of peace and friendship to the regional countries.”

Millions of barrels of oil are transported daily to Europe, the US and Asia through the Bab el-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways that run along the coasts of Yemen and Iran and has often been used by the Iranian regime as a threat to global trade.

The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in the region and protects shipping lanes in the Gulf and nearby waters.

On top of the regime banging the war drum loudly, it announced its intentions to buy 950 tons of uranium ore from Kazakhstan over the next three years and is relying on Russia to help refining the uranium into nuclear fuel.

The deal would not technically violate the horrifically bad nuclear agreement between Iran and the U.S. and other nations because the deal did not set limits on the Iranian regime’s ability to produce supplies of uranium ore, which gives you an idea of how idiotic the deal was to begin with.

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told the ISNA news agency that the purchase was supposed to happen “within three years.”

“650 tons will enter the country in two consignments and 300 tons will enter Iran in the third year,” he said.

Salehi said the final shipment of concentrate, known as yellow cake, would be turned into uranium hexafluoride gas and sold back to Kazakhstan — its first international sale of the compound which is used in the uranium enrichment process, according to Breitbart News.

Salehi said Iran has already received around 382 tons of yellow cake, primarily from Russia, since the nuclear deal came into force in January last year.

Under the deal, Iran is allowed to run around 5,000 “IR-1” centrifuges and has been testing more advanced models that can produce greater quantities of enriched uranium.

Taken together, the order to buy tons of uranium along with an almost constant string of military actions set an unsettling stage for the world in 2017. Couple these developments with the upcoming Iranian presidential elections in which it is assured that no dissident candidate will be allowed on the ballot by the regime’s ultraconservative Guardian Council, Iran will remain firmly in the control of mullah Ali Khamenei.

Amidst all of these provocative moves, the Iran lobby has been completely silent, never raising any objections to the escalation in Iran’s military activities, nor its desire to ramp up a civilian nuclear program that could be easily converted to military purposes.

For example, the Ploughshares Fund, which partly funds the National Iranian American Council, has been aggressive in making the claims that it works to stop nuclear proliferation, but in the case of the Iranian regime expanding its nuclear capacity, it is as deaf and dumb as a door post.

The lack of objections from the Iran lobby demonstrates its complicity in supporting these aggressive acts by the mullahs.

Michael Tomlinson

Only Language Iran Regime Understands is Bullying

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Only Language Iran Regime Understands is Bullying

Only Language Iran Regime Understands is Bullying

In some ways, the Trump administration may be as vexing to the mullahs in Tehran as the first British explorers glimpsing hieroglyphics in an Egyptian pyramid before discovering the Rosetta Stone.

In that regard, the mullahs are grappling with the same problem mystifying many journalists and members of both parties as they deal with a president who is undoubtedly one of the most unfiltered politicians since Winston Churchill.

For the mullahs, they have become accustomed to a string of U.S. leaders that have tried to engage the regime in the predictable language of diplomacy and through existing international structures such as the United Nations. Sometimes it has not worked to their advantage such as when Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush imposed sanctions on the regime.

Other times it has as President Barack Obama sought to try and appease the mullahs in an effort to secure a nuclear agreement.

What has been clear from the start is that since the days of the Islamic revolution in 1979, the ruling clerics have operated by using a language of threats, coercion, bullying and invective and it has not changed since then.

For the Iranian regime, using bullying to make a splash in international media is akin to North Korea launching a missile or setting off a nuclear bomb test.

The latest example was at the conclusion of a new round of war games put on by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in which an IRGC commander said the U.S. should expect a “strong slap in the face” if it underestimated the regime’s military capabilities.

“The enemy should not be mistaken in its assessments, and it will receive a strong slap in the face if it does make such a mistake,” said General Mohammad Pakpour, head of the Guards’ ground forces, quoted by the Guards’ website Sepahnews.

On Wednesday, the Revolutionary Guards concluded three days of exercises with rockets, artillery, tanks and helicopters, weeks after Trump warned that he had put Tehran “on notice” over the missile launch.

“The message of these exercises … for world arrogance is not to do anything stupid,” said Pakpour, quoted by the semi-official news agency Tasnim.

“Everyone could see today what power we have on the ground.” The Guards said they test-fired “advanced rockets” and used drones in the three-day exercises which were held in central and eastern Iran, according to Reuters.

But the Iranian regime didn’t just take verbal potshots at the U.S., it also has been ratcheting tensions with its neighbor Turkey as it takes on a more important relationship with Russia and secured a seat at the table of Syrian peace talks; clearly a move that the mullahs seem to be threatened by.

“Iran is an important neighbor to us. We have always been in dialogue with Iran. But it does not mean we will ignore Iran’s efforts in penetrating the region,” said Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin in the latest thinly veiled threat between the countries during his weekly news conference.

Kalin was responding to comments by Ali Akbar Velayati, a key adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who told Turkish soldiers to leave Iraq and Syria, or the people would “kick them out.”

“They are very serious, I mean the competition between Iran and Turkey, everyone knows it, it’s like two elephants in a small room,” warns political consultant Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners. “Iran is clearly an expansionist country, their goal of building a Shia circle all the way from Tehran to Lebanon is no secret, at least from the Turkish perspective.”

Experts say religious sectarianism underscores the tensions between predominantly Shia Iran and mostly Sunni Turkey, according to Voice of America News.

The escalation in tensions and verbal fisticuffs with Turkey is nothing new for the Iranian regime as it has already threatened its other Sunni-dominant neighbors in Saudi Arabia and Gulf States. Its supply of Houthi rebels in Yemen has sparked a civil war that threatens to plunge the Persian Gulf region deeper into a shooting war.

The Iranian regime’s willingness to use military force to back up its verbal threats has not been lost on its nervous neighbors and explains why there is movement for a regional coalition aligned against Iran’s expansionism.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been turning to other Sunni countries in the region for support. This month, he visited Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States for talks observers say focused on curtailing Iran’s influence. Analysts suggest Ankara’s assertive stance could be influenced by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“With Trump, flexing his muscles against Tehran, Ankara may have sensed an opportunity to bring this antagonism into the open and to finally resolve this longstanding low level conflict in Syria and Iraq space,” suggests consultant Yesilada.

None of which has stopped the Iranian regime from pushing aggressively on all fronts including news reports that the regime has started up a series of cyberattacks against Saudi Arabia after a four year hiatus.

Late last month, the Saudi government warned in a notice to telecommunications companies that an Iranian-origin malicious software called Shamoon had resurfaced in cyberattacks against some 15 Saudi organizations, including government networks, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The Shamoon malware was last detected in the 2012 cyberattack against the major Saudi state oil producer Aramco. That cyberattack damaged or destroyed some 30,000 computers and was considered one of the more destructive state-linked cyberattacks to date.

A State Department security report issued Feb. 10 stated that the 2012 attack destroyed over three-fourths of Aramco’s computers, and that the damage took five months to mitigate at “an extreme cost.”

Shamoon also was used in Iranian cyberattacks against RasGas, a liquified natural gas company located in neighboring Qatar.

A new version of the malware, Shamoon 2, was linked to the recent cyberattack, which took place in November. Security officials linked that attack to a Middle East hacker group known as Greenbug that used fraudulent emails in phishing scams to acquire login credentials for Saudi networks.

The Iranian regime is clearly speaking the same language it has always used and it’s time for the rest of the world respond in kind.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Absurdly Punishes 18 Year Old Chess Prodigy

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Iran Regime Absurdly Punishes 18 Year Old Chess Prodigy

Iran Regime Absurdly Punishes 18 Year Old Chess Prodigy

There are lots of reasons why teenagers get punished. They stay out too late. They get bad grades in school. They drink alcohol or take drugs.

Why then would an 18-year-old chess prodigy who has achieved the exalted status a grand master get punished? Did she fail to sacrifice her queen to win a gambit?

In the case of

, when she competed at the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival last month, she committed a grave act in the eyes of the Iranian regime; she chose to wear a simple headband instead of a mandated hijab head covering while she played.

As a result of this grave act, Mehrdad Pahlevanzadeh, the head of Iran’s Chess Federation, ruled this week that Derakshani would be kicked off the national team.

Derakhshani’s younger brother Borna, 15, who also entered the tournament, was also kicked off the team. His offense was agreeing to play an Israeli opponent, according to the Washington Post.

Let’s forget for a moment that kicking a grand master off your national team is akin to benching LeBron James before the Olympics, but punishing children is even more absurd.

“Unfortunately, what shouldn’t have happened has happened,” Pahlevanzadeh told the semiofficial Fars News Agency on Monday (via Radio Free Europe). “Our national interests have priority over everything.”

“As a first step, these two will be denied entry to all tournaments taking place in Iran,” he continued, “And, in the name of Iran, they will no longer be allowed the opportunity to be present on the national team.”

That the two young chess masters received such a harsh punishment is not a surprise. Sports in Iran and other parts of the Middle East have long been affected by the region’s strict cultural norms and precarious political stance.

Last year, American chess master Nazi Paikidze did not compete in the chess world championships in Iran because of the country’s requirement that she don a hijab, said the Post.

“Some consider a hijab part of culture,” Paikidze said in an Instagram post announcing her decision. “But, I know that a lot of Iranian women are bravely protesting this forced law daily and risking a lot by doing so. That’s why I will NOT wear a hijab and support women’s oppression.”

The controversy over the hijab is incidental to the larger issues it represents which is the near constant oppression of Iranian women in a society that legitimizes misogyny, allows for the public beating of women found in violation of dress codes, and regularly arrests girls and women who post on social media selfies in which they do not wear head coverings.

The fact that the Iranian regime uses sports and competition as platforms to advance its views is nothing new. The recent welcoming entry of an American wrestling team to wide media coverage stands out in sharp contrast to the disqualification of these teenaged prodigies.

It is also interesting to see the silence from the Iran lobby on this subject. While groups such as the National Iranian American Council have been vociferous in its protests of social issues such as the controversy over President Trump’s immigrant visa moratorium, it has been stone-dead silent on issues such as the rights of women in Iran and the abuse they suffer at the hands of the regime’s dreaded morality police.

The contrast and hypocrisy is stunning.

It may also explain why American views of the leadership in Iran has plunged to all-time lows in spite of the full-court public relations offensive put on by the Iran lobby.

An annual survey by Gallup on Americans’ views of foreign countries earlier this month revealed that Iran and North Korea were the least liked countries out of the 21 on the list.

Other countries in the “most unfavorable” category, which contains nations that have favorable ratings lower than 20 percent and unfavorable ratings above 70 percent, were Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The poll was conducted before recent events such as North Korea’s ballistic missile test in violation of U.N. resolutions and the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s half-brother.

It does put into perspective though that in spite of the efforts by the Iran lobby to portray Iran as a moderate state, its militant actions such as intervention in Syria and support for a civil war in Yemen, along with its recent launches of ballistic missiles have firmly convinced the American people that the Iranian regime’s leadership is dangerous and untrustworthy.

Also noteworthy was a call by 100 leading Iranian dissidents to Congress to investigate the Iran lobby’s efforts to influence U.S. policy through its network of lobbyists and spin doctors.

The group of dissidents, composed of prominent Iranian voices that oppose the hardline regime in Tehran, says that Congress is not doing enough to expose the Iranian regime’s lobbying efforts in D.C. and propaganda network, which is said to include some at Voice of America Persia.

Iranian-American groups claiming to represent American interests are said to be carrying water for the Islamic regime inside the White House and on Capitol Hill, according to these dissident voices.

The letter cites VOA’s Persian service as a source of pro-Iran corruption. The Free Beacon has reported multiple times on claims that VOA has been infiltrated by Iran regime loyalists who seek to spin coverage in a favorable way for Tehran. In one instance, an Iranian dissident was barred from appearing on VOA Persia for voicing critical opinions about the regime.

Laura Carnahan

 

Iran Regime Confronted At Home and Abroad

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Iran Regime Confronted At Home and Abroad

Iran Regime Confronted At Home and Abroad

Another weekend and another round of aggressive military actions from the Iranian regime greeted the world. The mullahs engage in regular acts of defiance on a schedule as predictable as North Korea it seems.

The latest episode involves the regime’s announcement of another series of military war games by the Revolutionary Guard Corps with the first phase kicking off on Monday with the launching of a series of rockets and missiles.

“Today, various classes of smart rockets with pinpoint accuracy were successfully test-fired, which showed the power of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Brigadier General Pakpour told reporters on Monday.

The type of rockets and missiles used were not disclosed, but the regime has been actively launching ballistic missiles of various types over the past several months, earning sharp rebukes from the international community and the U.S. in particular as violations of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.

The maneuvers are scheduled to last three days and are dubbed “Grand Prophet 11.” Pakpour said that some unspecified rockets, the IRGC’s drones, and artillery would also be used during the exercises.

The military drills will be held despite warnings from the United States and the implementation of new sanctions by Washington over a ballistic-missile test conducted by Iran on January 29.

“Iran would do well not to test the resolve of this new president [Donald Trump],” U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said earlier this month, as the new Trump administration had announced that it had put Iran “on notice” after the missile test last month.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has also said that Iran is “the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.”

The ramp up in military actions, followed by threats of sanctions and retaliation have set a volatile stage for the Iranian regime in which its usual repertoire of threats followed by more threats may finally fall on deaf ears of an U.S. administration appearing to be more resolute in confronting the regime rather than appeasing it.

It also follows a new Congress which seems eager to push forward new sanctions after being held off by the Obama administration the past several years.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) revealed plans Sunday to introduce legislation that would impose further economic sanctions on Iran, according to a Reuters report.

Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, mentioned the plans for increased measures during a panel discussion at the 2017 Munich Security Conference.

“I think it is now time for the Congress to take Iran on directly in terms of what they’ve done outside the nuclear program,” Graham said.

Graham said he and other senators would be introducing a measure to hold Iran accountable for its actions, Reuters reported.

James Jones, a former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and President Barack Obama’s first national security adviser, told a separate event in Munich that he remained convinced that sanctions had persuaded Iran to negotiate the 2015 landmark deal with six world powers to curb its nuclear program.

“The sanctions did work. Iran would never have come to the negotiating table without sanctions,” Jones said. “This is a new form of response that if properly utilized can change behavior and get people to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t do.”

Regime Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, who also attended the Munich Security Conference, said Iran doesn’t “respond well” to coercion and threats.

“We don’t respond well to coercion. We don’t respond well to sanctions, but we respond very well to mutual respect. We respond very well to arrangements to reach mutually acceptable scenarios,” Zarif said on Sunday, according to an AP report.

It’s a curious statement for Zarif to make since the Iranian regime has done everything but act respectfully towards its neighbors and the rest of the international community.

It’s doubtful the government in Yemen would find Iranian regime’s supplying of Houthi rebel forces a respectful act, nor would the vast majority of Syrian civilians who have endured a savage conflict at the hands of the IRGC’s Quds Forces and Hezbollah fighters find that a respectful act as well.

But the pressure the mullahs are feeling from a new American administration has only compounded the pressure mounting from within Iran as they struggle with growing protests and environmental crises made worse by gross mismanagement.

According to the New York Times, days of protests over dust storms, power failures and government mismanagement in one of Iran’s most oil-rich cities subsided on Sunday after security forces declared all demonstrations illegal.

Residents of Ahvaz, a city with a majority Arab population near the border with Iraq, had been protesting for five days in increasingly large gatherings, shown in cellphone video clips shared on social media.

The region around Ahvaz is a center of oil production in Iran, and since economic sanctions were lifted, Iranian people had hoped for changes to renovate the worn-out water and electricity instructures and fix deepening ecological problems.

The cellphone clips show protesters calling for the resignation of the local governor. And as the number of demonstrators grew, the demands started to include a call for top officials from the capital, Tehran, to come to Ahvaz to see the problems for themselves.

Demonstrators can also be heard shouting, “Unemployment, unemployment,” another big problem in the region, and urging their countrymen to offer assistance: “Iranian compatriots, help us, help us.”

A 15-year drought, in combination with poorly planned dam building, has caused local marshes to dry up, increasing the level of dust particles in the air to record highs.

The World Health Organization said in 2015 that Ahvaz was the most polluted city in the world.

With the ruling theocracy in Iran continuing to poor the country’s resources in to the Syrian war, supporting Yemeni’s Houthis, violent militia groups in Iraq, development of Ballistic Missiles,  the pressure will only mount and similar to how North Korea has handled persistent starvation, the Iranian regime will not flex its military muscles in an effort to divert attention from the misery of the Iranian people.

Michael Tomlinson

While Iran Regime Throws Roses It Denies Medical Treatment

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While Iran Regime Throws Roses It Denies Medical Treatment

While Iran Regime Throws Roses It Denies Medical Treatment

Nothing illustrates the cold, calculating nature of the Iranian regime than two incidents happening this week.

On the one hand, an American wrestling team was welcomed with open arms, red roses and a barrage of social media selfies as it arrived in Iran for a tournament that had been threatened in response to President Trump’s visa moratorium.

The two-day tournament began Thursday, when U.S. wrestlers faced off against Georgia, Russia and Azerbaijan. The Iranian regime didn’t miss the opportunity to stage photos of the Americans being surrounded by well-wishers and flooding social media with comments praising the team, but deriding the U.S. government.

“Welcome to Iran champ!!!!” one Iranian user, Saeed Mohammadi, commented on an Instagram photo.

Another, Nima Jan, said he was traveling to the stadium to cheer for the Americans,

“You proved that you are a noble man.… This is a big chance for us,”Nima Jan commented on an Instagram. “We do not pay attention to the behavior of America’s government” toward Iran, according to the Washington Post.

Widely considered a national sport, wrestling has been one venue to maintain a cultural channel between Iran and the U.S. In fact, a U.S. wrestling team became the first American sports team to visit Iran since the revolution.

In contrast to that public photo opportunity, in the dank, dark confines of Evin prison, a British-Iranian mother and an aid worker languishes, falling ill and being denied medical treatment by the regime.

According to the Times of London, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, who has been held in prison since April last year, was denied urgent medical treatment for a neck injury sustained in prison that has left her unable to lift her arms or carry her child.

Prison officials last week refused to refer the charity worker to a neurologist, despite an X-ray and MRI scan revealing that vertebrae in her neck were out of place.

She is unable to move her arms beyond a certain point or lift her two-year-old daughter Gabriella, who is also trapped in Iran after regime authorities confiscated her British passport.

The cruelty of Ratcliffe’s continued incarceration and denial of medical care has earned sharp rebukes from the British government and human rights groups, but it follows a typical pattern of abuse heaped on detained dual national citizens by the regime.

Repeated incidents like this, depict an essential truth of the Iranian regime which is that it is without compassion or mercy and utilizes innocent people to its political advantage on the world stage. It will willingly use a sports team to stage a photo opp to protest moves designed to restrict the movement of terrorists supported by the Iranian regime and it will also put the screws to an ailing mother to put pressure on a British government balking at opening up trade with the regime.

The mullahs are cruel and callous and any press releases or news interviews by Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council cannot hide that simple truth.

The mullahs calculate every move and weigh every opportunity. They are less religious leaders and more like accountants and they count up the ill-gotten gains they receive from their various black market channels, especially with the nuclear agreement which opened up additional sources of funding to them.

Heshmat Alavi, an Iranian activist, penned a piece in Forbes looking at how the regime was benefitting from the nuclear agreement.

“Now in early 2017, however, signs indicate the main winners in Iran are none other than state-owned companies. This means Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the terrorist-supporting Revolutionary Guards are enjoying JCPOA benefits,” Alavi writes.  “At least 90 of the nearly 110 agreements, totaling nearly $80 billion, involve such state-controlled companies. This includes the National Iranian Oil Company, parallel to others run by regime pension funds and massive conglomerates of semi-public nature.”

“It is a known fact that Tehran maintains a heavy hand over the economy, providing circumstances allowing state-controlled firms to acquire most business deals made possible after sanctions were lifted. The private sector makes up a mere 20% of Iran’s economy, according to official estimates,” he added. “To this end, private companies have received a dismal 17 deals, including a hotel management contract sealed most probably because of the French partner’s chief executive being the brother of Eshaq Jahangiri, Iran’s vice president.”

For the Iranian regime, decision-making is all about perception, economic benefits and exporting its extremist brand of Islam.

Unfortunately, until the world joins together again to confront the Iranian regime, innocents such as Ratcliffe will continue to pay the price.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Regime Does Away With Moderate Façade

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Iran Regime Does Away With Moderate Façade

Archive-Iran Regime Does Away With Moderate Façade

The old adage goes “judge me by my deeds, not my words.” It’s appropriate to apply it to the Iranian regime when weighing how to react to the Islamic state. In the case of the new Trump administration, it is becoming increasingly easy to figure out what is motivating the mullahs in Tehran.

The Iran lobby, most notably the National Iranian American Council, has always made the argument to ignore the rhetoric and judge Iran by its people and the “moderates” struggling to gain control of the government.

Notable Iran lobby advocates such as NIAC’s Trita Parsi have literally yelled from the rooftops that Iran was not really interested in confrontations with the U.S. and only wanted a new friendly relationship. It was this slippery slope the Obama administration fell down in acquiescing broadly to the demands of the mullahs in crafting a nuclear deal separate and apart from placing conditions on things such as support for terrorism and abusive human rights.

Unfortunately, virtually none of those promises have come to pass and in the face of a Trump administration that has opted for an aggressive posture towards Iran with newly announced sanctions and the appointment of several vocal regime critics in key cabinet positions, the mullahs seem to have finally decided to drop the charade and stop trying to portray themselves as moderates.

The latest evidence of that came in the form of a full-length animated film depicting an armed confrontation between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the U.S. Navy soon to open in Iranian cinemas.

According to Reuters, the director of the “Battle of Persian Gulf II”, Farhad Azima, said that it was a remarkable coincidence that the release of the film – four years in the making – coincided with a “warmongering” president sitting in the White House.

“I hope that the film shows Trump how American soldiers will face a humiliating defeat if they attack Iran,” Azima told Reuters in a telephone interview from the city of Mashhad in eastern Iran.

The 88-minute animation opens with the U.S. Army attacking an Iranian nuclear reactor, and the U.S. Navy in the Gulf hitting strategic locations across the county.

In the film, the IRGC retaliates by raining its ballistic missiles on U.S. warships.

“They all sink and the film ends as the American ships have turned into an aquarium for fishes at the bottom of the sea,” Azima said.

The main Iranian commander in the film has been intentionally depicted as Qassem Soleimani, the notorious IRGC commander who is overseeing Iran’s military operations in Syria and Iraq against Islamist militants and was designated a supporter of terrorism by the U.S. for his role in coordinating the manufacture and delivery of IEDs to Iranian-controlled Shiite militias in Iraq targeting U.S. personnel.

Soleimani was reportedly seen arriving in Moscow earlier this week in violation of sanctions restricting his travel. He has been to Moscow several times ignoring his travels bans on Iranian airlines to discuss military operations in Syria with Russian officials. His direct pleas have been widely regarded as key to persuading Russia to enter the conflict in order to save the faltering Assad regime.

This is Soleimani’s third trip to Moscow following visits in April and July 2015. Soleimani is thought to be the mastermind behind Iran’s proxy war in Syria in order to prop up the Assad regime. Soleimani met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu days after the Iranian nuclear deal was agreed to in Vienna.

According to Fox News, Soleimani was in Moscow to register the mullahs’ displeasure with Russia’s relationship with Iran’s regional foes, specifically the sale of Russian military equipment to Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

Lest we forget, the Iranian regime has steadily increased the tempo of bell`igerent actions since the nuclear deal, including the detention and parade of American sailors, widening of the wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and a steady stream of propaganda efforts including the routine “Death to America” depictions as well as the launching of increasingly more powerful ballistic missiles.

The latest disclosures of the IRGC’s operation of a vast network of training camps for its own and foreign fighters to be deployed in conflicts abroad by a network of Iranian dissident groups only solidifies the argument that the Iranian regime is done with the pretense of trying to be a more moderate nation.

The dissident groups, led by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, have issued calls for the IRGC to be designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization as a whole.

Iran already is part of the U.S. State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list, along with Syria and Sudan. However, new calls are coming from leading critics of the regime to designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization – and the Trump administration is said to be considering that.

“The people of Iran would welcome the designation of the IRGC, which is responsible for thousands of political executions and tortures in prison. It is also responsible for training terrorists supporting and engaging in terrorist activities outside Iran,” said Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the NCRI, which is the largest Iranian opposition group.

“I believe the time has come for a firm policy on Iran. The failed policy of appeasement has hurt the Iranian people, as well as global peace and security,” she said.

To emphasize the suffering of the Iranian people under the mullahs’ medieval rule, news reports came out of a 14-year old girl suffering a savage beating by the regime’s morality police for wearing ripped jeans.

Zahra*, who The Independent is not identifying for fear she may suffer reprisals, was celebrating her birthday with friends last week when a patrol of “morality police” pulled up.

The teenager said officers tried to force her and her friends into their car in the city of Shiraz, beating them when they resisted.

“There were two women and two men in a huge van and they pushed us into it with the force of their beatings,” she recalled. “Their objection was to the ripped jeans that we were wearing. There were really no other issues concerning my friends and I.”

“I still carry the bruises sustained from their beatings on my face,” she said. “I still feel their pressure on my arm and my ribs still hurt.”

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, her mother described the ordeal as “the worst day of my life, as if the world has ended for me”.

Rules are enforced by thousands of visible and undercover religious or “morality” police, who patrol the streets to check for violations.

Women found to have their hair or bodies inadequately covered can be publicly admonished, warned, fined or even arrested, while vigilantes are also active.

This is why any discussion of a moderate Iran under its current leadership is simply another case of “fake news.”

Laura Carnahan

Case For Designating the IRGC as Terrorists Builds

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Case For Designating the IRGC as Terrorists Builds

Case For Designating the IRGC as Terrorists Builds

Momentum continues to build for the U.S. to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a Foreign Terrorist Organization as a whole. Much of that momentum stems from the IRGC’s own actions over the years in supporting terrorism worldwide as well as initiating, supplying and controlling many of the proxy wars breaking out throughout the Middle East.

Even though there has already been well-documented disclosures about the IRGC’s illicit activities, new information continues to come to light as was the case on Tuesday when the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a leading global organization of Iranian dissident and human rights groups, held a press conference in Washington, DC to disclose details of the IRGC’s terrorist training activities.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the Washington Office of the NCRI, presented information to reporters gathered by the social network of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a dissident group located inside Iran. He said that information shows that since 2012, the NCRI has seen an increase in the training of foreign nationals in its terrorist training camps, which threatens a wide scope of countries, not just those beset by conventional warfare.

Using intelligence gleaned from sources within Iran, the NCRI claimed that the IRGC had created a training command operating dozens of military bases across Iran specializing in all aspects of warfare with units divided by national origin and specialization such as missile and naval operations to insurgency and urban warfare.

The IRGC that is answerable only to the Iranian regime’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei. It specializes in insurgency and guerilla tactics and is notorious for having supplied most of the IEDs used by Iranian-controlled Shiite militias in Iraq targeting U.S. and foreign troops; resulting in the deaths and wounding of thousands of Americans.

The IRGC was the initial unit that came to the rescue of the Assad regime in Syria as it teetered on the brink of collapse by smuggling in weapons and cash, as well as recruiting and directing Hezbollah fighters. It eventually expanded its role to include Iranian military, as well as the recruitment of Afghan mercenaries and deployment of Shiite militias from Iraq.

According to the NCRI, every month, hundreds of forces from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Lebanon — countries where the regime is involved in frontline combat — receive military training and are subsequently dispatched to the various frontlines. For operations in countries where there is no open warfare – including Persian Gulf countries, such as Bahrain and Kuwait – terrorists cells are trained instead.

The NCRI highlighted 14 IRGC training camps, as well as described the command structure, detailing how the commander of the Training Directorate, reports directly to Quds Force Commander, Qassem Soleimani.

Terrorist training for operatives from across the globe is commanded by Colonel Tahmasebi. Codenamed ‘320’, the commander of heavy weapons training at Imam Ali military base is Colonel Ali Mohammad. In charge of ‘VIP Security’ is Colonel Ramky, the NCRI said.

The sheer scale of the Training Directorate’s efficiency in producing fighters is underscored by the fact that just one of its training camps is currently sending 2,000 Afghans to Syria every week, according to the NCRI.

“The IRGC is actually the entity that runs the whole show when it comes to terrorism,” even though they are spearheaded by the Quds force, Jafarzadeh said. “You cannot do the separation. You cannot have the Quds force designated as a terrorist entity, but not the IRGC.”

Jafarzadeh said there is bipartisan support in Congress for the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist group, and suggested that with the new Trump administration, there is “a better possibility for those measures to move forward.”

The disclosures by the NCRI are significant since they provide first-hand and eyewitness accounts of the IRGC and Quds Force activities as it relates to the active support of terrorism and terror-related operations. It also points out with disturbing clarity the efforts by the Iranian regime to ramp up its military activities outside of its borders during the time it sought to portray itself as a “moderate” nation intent on resolving disputes peacefully.

Another example of those destabilizing activities has been the IRGC’s initiation of the revolt in Yemen with Houthi rebels supplied by IRGC forces; mostly smuggled aboard non-descript fishing boats in the Gulf of Aden.

Many of these ships have been intercepted and weapons confiscated by Saudi Arabian and Gulf State warships; the arms eventually traced back to Iranian factories.

Sanam Vakil, Ph.D an Associate Fellow at Catham House told IBTimes UK that the PMOI report spoke to the extent of the IRGC’s training scheme, although she could not independently verify the numbers.

“What I take from this is that this is a very sophisticated operation,” Vakil said. “Iran’s strategic strength is in a-symmetrical proxy relationships. Its conventional military is weak particularly in Iraqi and Syria they have had success in the past. Of course we also know they are the God Parents of Hezbollah.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that in order to effect the growth of Islamic-inspired terrorism abroad, the restraint of the IRGC will be a key factor. Designating it a FTO would be an important step in the right direction.

Michael Tomlinson