generalspeaking

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Celebrating A Generation Milestone of Islamic Republic of Iran Confronting the Corrupt and Unworthy World Order

"The depiction of him [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false."
"Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on non-violent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country."
Richard Falk, professor of international law, Princeton University, The New York Times, 1979

Speaking at a Washington, D.C. press conference, former UN Palestine Rapporteur Richard Falk lashed out at UN Watch for “damaging my reputation,” “stirring up trouble” for Falk and his colleagues, and “weakening” UN efforts to “document Israeli violations of international law.”

Infallible judgement from emeritus professor of international law at one of America's most prestigious elite universities. At a time when the Islamic Revolution in Iran emboldened university students in Tehran to lay siege to the U.S. Embassy and to hold American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days in a stand-off that then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter -- a conciliator of Middle East Arab and Muslim complaints over the presence of the State of Israel, supportive of the violence expressed by Palestinian terrorists whom he equated as struggling against Israeli 'apartheid' -- was powerless to conclude.

The Islamic Revolution made its debut performance on the world stage, in effect, by holding the most powerful nation in the world hostage to its ire over 'U.S. interference' in Islamic affairs of state. Notwithstanding that most Islamic countries depended on the United States to shield them from the consequences of their own ill-judged actions, much less the traditional hostilities they exerted in confronting one another through the paranoid lens of tribal and sectarian enmities.

Iranian students crowd the U.S. Embassy in Tehran (November 4 1979)

Richard Falk, infamously, was appointed United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in the Occupied Territories where he distinguished himself by conspicuously demonstrating an outright hatred and contempt for the State of Israel, damning it at every turn for the 'suppression' of Palestinian rights and the 'occupation' over Palestinian territory:
"The best prospect for realizing Palestinian self-determination now is by way of pressures exerted through grassroots mobilization".
"We must strengthen the global solidarity movement, which includes the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) initiative in relation to businesses that profit from the settlements, as well as other forms of non-violent resistance."
"Third party Member States of the United Nations also have an important responsibility to ensure they are not complicit in human rights violations in Occupied Palestine."

Under his tenure the UN HRC issued countless sanctions against Israel for assumed human rights abuses, charging it with violations of basic human rights targeting Palestinians. No neutrality of judgement or balance in viewing the commission of violence against Israel, much less condemnation of Palestinian recruitment of future martyrs by a PA curriculum for school-age children groomed to hate Israel and Jews and inculcate in them a wish for martyrdom, much less the salaries paid to those committing atrocities against Israeli citizens and honours bestowed upon them.

So how did his prediction and smug confidence in the capabilities and direction and future of the Islamic Republic of Iran turn out? Given this man's orientation, very nicely. That the Ayatollahs preferred to slap down the hand of accommodation proffered by another American president, Barack Obama, was only Iran informing the U.S. it was aware of its secret agenda to elevate Israeli interests over those of the rightful inheritors of Jerusalem, the ancient city sacred to Islam, not Judaism. They certainly read Obama wrong.

From the Republic's spectacular introduction of itself to the world at large to the succeeding years when Britain authorized a security detail to protect Salman Rushdie from the fatwa issued for his life, forfeit for insulting the Prophet Mohammad, to the 1980s when Iran's Lebanese Hezbollah militia was authorized to launch attacks internationally against Jewish targets and the mass slaughter of thousands of political prisoners in Iran, the Ayatollahs made their mark on Persian annals of its civilized heritage.

Assassinations and bombings of international targets though clandestinely pursued, were linked by intelligence agencies to their source; gifts from Tehran to Buenos Aires and Berlin, for starters. A different kind of student protest in 1999 was brutally suppressed, followed by the green revolutionaries hoping to thwart the Republic's plans to rule and ruin the nation indefinitely. And then came the covert activities to acquire suspect nuclear facilities.

And who wants to recall Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration in the United Nations that the shining light of the Hidden Mahdi enveloped him as he addressed the General Assembly? Or that even there in that hallowed hall of world peace, unification and equality, he promised that Iran would destroy the presence of the State of Israel, to barely a murmur of dissent, more than equalling the earlier dated presence of Yasser Arafat, dove in one hand, pistol in the other.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks during a ceremony celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Azadi Square, Tehran, on February 11, 2019.

Yet eventually, the world saw and acclaimed the election of a 'moderate' President of Iran when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who in an earlier manifestation as an elite follower of Ayatollah Khomeini successfully practised the art of deceit and boasted of it afterward, presenting Iran's aspirations as being wholly immersed in peaceful pursuits despite all indications to the contrary, then led his country to another victory with the implementation of the nuclear agreement, allowing the country to get on with its intercontinental ballistic missiles program, its nuclear program less prominently.

That Iran dedicated its Revolutionary Presidential Guard al-Quds division to aid and support to the Alawite Shia Syrian regime enabling the destruction of a half-million Syrian lives and the displacement of millions of its Sunni citizens suited Shiite Iran very well indeed, dispatching Hezbollah to the conflict zones and later Shiite militias looking for blood to spill. And then came the Yemeni Shiite-brand Houthis to destabilize Yemen and bring it firmly alongside Syria, Lebanon and oddly enough Qatar, into the Iranian orbit.

Most certainly, the Islamic Revolution has earned its notorious place as a threat to security in the Middle East, having aligned itself with Russia and Turkey, all pleased to be seen as a triumvirate of solid resistance against the West and its rapacious interests in despoiling the Middle East of its inestimable resources which they would be far more adept at doing in a far more collegial spirit of co-operation. For the time being.