On Trump the Flamethrower and the Protests in Iran

Rasa - Of all the various twists and turns of the unrests in Iran in the past few days, the effort by the Trump White House to marginalize and stigmatize the Islamic Republic is among the more preposterous.

News ID: 435604

Date: 01 January 2018 - 23:07

RNA - The man, who last year called Iran a “terrorist nation” and banned all Iranians from visiting the United States, now wants to sympathize with the protesters and feels sorry for the people of Iran! Lest he forgets, this is an internal matter and the people of Iran don’t want Trump’s sympathy. In fact, they have been paying a heavy price for Washington’s unjustified sanctions regime and hostility since the revolution of 1979. Last thing they want to hear is for America’s “duplicitous and opportunist” president to take to Twitter to express support for demonstrations, arguing that "the Iranian government should respect their people's rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching!"

The flamethrower-in-chief should take note: Iran is the only democracy in the Middle East, the only free nation, where in the words of President Hassan Rouhani, “based on the Constitution and citizenship rights, people are completely free to express their criticism and even their protest." If they don’t break the law or destroy public property, they can and should voice their criticism with regard to all affairs. After all, “the government and the country belong to the people and the people must properly express what they want."

More so, unlike what the flamethrower-in-chief in Washington would like to suggest, criticism is not same as violence or inflicting damage on public property, and certainly it cannot and shouldn’t be allowed to undermine lives and security in any given country. Trump is in no position to sympathize with Iranians through his outrageous and insulting comments. Simply put, people attach no value to his opportunistic remarks.

He knows better than anyone else that a handful of those who destroyed public property during the unrests were not peaceful protesters demanding a better life for themselves and their families. Those protesters who were rightfully demanding economic recovery are mostly gone home now, and the ones that are still out there and are no more than a couple of hundreds in cities and towns with a population between 100,000 and 1 million and insist on destroying private and public properties in their nightly riots are being manipulated by the West-based social media platforms and agents of foreign intelligence services and MKO (the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization - a terrorist group hosted and assisted by the US) to undermine national security and peace.

That the Trump White House is over the moon to see some instability in Iran should come as surprise to no one: Resistance was the watchword for 2017. Resistance not just to Washington’s terror proxies in Iraq and Syria, but to a fossilized status quo that was no more in the region.

The progressives and the resistance front not only refused to let America’s proxies create an American caliphate in the Levant; they managed to challenge old orthodoxies and get everyone on board to vote against Trump’s divisive decision at the UN General Assembly to declare Jerusalem Al-Quds as Israel’s new capital.

The stunning military victories of the allied forces of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Russia, Hezbollah and Popular Mobilization Units in the Levant signaled that there is no country for terrorists and that a new Middle East that is in peace with itself and independent of the United States really is possible. What began as a limited military campaign in 2017 ended with the allied forces rejecting and defeating one of Trump’s most vile allies ISIL in favor of peace and security.

It is said, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Last year, Iran helped Iraq and Syria in their darkest hours bend the arc of Washington and terror proxies and they have all come back with a vengeance to take hope from the Iranian nation. They all speak with a single resounding voice with, in fact, unmatched hostility and fervour as they stretch hands across the nation to get others on board. Perhaps they have already guessed that just like in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, they are in for a bigger defeat in Iran.

As Iranians generally seem to partake of the same spirit. While esteem for the Islamic Revolution and the establishment hasn’t fallen radically in these years when the country was busy helping its allies defeat ISIL, Al-Qaeda and affiliates in Iraq and Syria, the people of Iran haven’t lost a step – despite the economic hardships that are mainly because of America’s sanctions regime. Some people might have their complaints but confidence in the Islamic Republic and its institutions generally hasn’t dropped at all. The large turnout in the presidential election some 8 months ago - that registered one of the largest in the world - is only one of the many proofs to corroborate the above-mentioned claim.

In some respects, a soaring percentage of Iranians have the highest possible confidence in the armed forces because of their recent victories in Iraq and Syria. This makes Trump’s decision to sympathize with a handful of protesters undoubtedly an unpopular one. In a similar vein, it’s striking that America’s war on Iran, now entering its 39th dismal year and still expanding, and the sanctions regime that wages it remain essentially the main criticism and protest for many people over here.

Who cares? No wonder Donald Trump, a man of no fixed beliefs and values, is busy doing his escalatory damnedest from Mashhad to Tehran. With all of this in mind, as another year in which permanent hostility is the clearly noticed background hum of Washington’s questionable, scandalous, and criminal activity, the people of Iran know just where they are headed, where they are in the region, what they should be doing to protect themselves, and what they should never expect from the White House, its war president, their general bellicosity, and their attack dogs.

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