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A False Resignation from Iranian Power, While the Regime Still Flirts with EU

By Kaveh Taheri  posted by Anni Cyruss 


The Khomeinist regime’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Javad Zarif, oddly posted a dubious resignation on his Instagram account before midnight local time, February 25, 2019. But it turns out that this phony resignation from power in the Islamic Republic of Iran was effectively legitimizing the regime, rather than weakening it, as appeared. In fact, an IRGC General still backs Zarif.

Not long after Zarif’s social media circus, foreign pundits and officials commented positively on the event, although they were as wrong as the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who responded, “Zarif is gone. Good riddance.”

The sinister minister Zarif reminds Iranians of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

“We do not jail people for their opinions," said the liar-in-chief, Mr. Zarif, in an interview with the American television program host Charlie Rose, as aired on April 27, 2015.

The propagandist FM calls himself a “human rights professor.” Meanwhile, more than 7,000 protesters, students, journalists, environmentalists, workers, and human rights defenders, including lawyers, women’s rights activists, minority rights activists, and trade unionists, were arrested in Iran in 2018, as reported by Amnesty International.

The dissimulating FM said that wearing hijab is part of Iranian culture, while the Girls of Enghelab Street (Persian: دختران خیابان انقلاب) along with a few sympathetic men began a series of protests against compulsory hijab in their Persian homeland. The #GirlsOfRevolutionStreet made their iconic protest image widely known by bravely standing on top of utility boxes above the busy sidewalks of Enghelab (Revolution) Street in the center of Tehran, from which they defiantly waved their white head scarf on the end of a stick.

The Trump administration is willing to reach a good deal if the terrorist regime changes its aggressive regional behavior. However, the smug FM responded, “You'll never get a better deal”.

Mr. Zarif remains the chief of the Islamic regime's foreign affairs. He has always been supported and favored by Islamic Republic of Iran senior officials, especially the Supreme Leader, as Persian Euronews quoted IRGC’s Quds chief, Maj. Gen Qassem Soleimani. But in the West, "The Shadow Commander" is a wanted man, who has been formally labeled a supporter of terrorism by the United States since 2007.

The clever FM is as much akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing as is the so-called moderate, Hassan Rouhani. The charmer-in-chief Zarif plays to the media like a “display window” in his role as an “echo chamber” of what the media wants to hear, as he covers for the regime’s mistreatment of Iranian people under its harsh rule.

Zarif's ostensible resignation was presumably a strategic move to divert attention from the JCPOA nuclear deal fiasco. Most certainly, he was aware of the coming rejection of his resignation by Khamenei and Rouhani which followed. And it is likely that he wanted to recover his lost credibility and also to deflect pressure from Rouhani's administration.

I believe it showed us the failure of the Iranian regime’s negotiations with the United States. The bottom line is that this whole public relations game was no shock to the regime, said the Iranian socio-political activist, Sina Nahavandi.

To make a long story short, basically, this attempt at rebranding by Zarif of Rouhani's government and his pathetic administration is to resell it to the Europeans. So basically, it is just a sham by the same liars, who are pushing the same fakeries as before, with the same baseless claims. For the next four years, they want to resell the same sham to the west again. So it's just a rebranding of the earlier empty promises, as simple as that, says EU correspondent and Iran analyst, Mohsen Behzad Karimi. It is absurd and a coverup, commented Ali, an Iranian citizen from inside the country.

In the world’s democratic countries, which have legitimate governments, an act of resignation is  genuine and is done with dignity, replacing a failed official with the right person as needed to advance the country’s national or subnational politics. But in Iran’s Islamic Republic regime, the formula is quite the opposite. In contrast to the democratic governments, IRI officials are placed in governmental positions due to their personal relations with power centers, the regime leaders’ trust in them, and in a word, their rants.

In such a regime as the IRI, there has been a pack of individuals who are always, in any circumstances, entrenched in power. It really does not matter what changes appear to take place in the regime’s national politics or plans; or if the officials are fit for such jobs or not. One way or another, they stay on their jobs, because the regime’s Islamic system of tight control trusts only them. To allow for a new specialized person in the job would be to let in an uncertain element, a risky move not wanted by the regime. And so in such controlled countries as the IRI, the purported act of resignation is nonsense, and absurd.

Javad Zarif’s feigned resignation exactly follows this pattern. Now that the behind-the-scenes stories have come to light, it is clear that his “resignation” move was a kind of objection to his being kept unaware of Bashar al-Assad’s visit to Tehran. His resignation announcement was a sudden and emotional act, which indicates his lack of a big heart. But, he used his resignation as his national-scale sacrifice to bring back credibility to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To paraphrase Shakespeare, he will roar like a lion.

Anyway, whether it came from personal anger or desire for sacrifice, whatever his reason was, by definition, a claim of “resignation” from power by an official in the Islamic Republic is meaningless. Whatever Mr. Zarif intended to achieve, his resignation show was tiresome to witness, and absurd in effect. But certainly, his tumultuous act turned all eyes away from covering the news of the regime's continuing acts against Iran’s national interests, and its clandestine meeting with the arrival from Damascus.

By Kaveh Taheri (Twitter: @TaheriKaveh) , co-founder and chairman of the ICBHR.Com, is a Turkey-based Iranian Human Rights researcher and journalist who has worked exclusively on Middle East. Kaveh, who was a former political prisoner in Shiraz, had been sent to prison for his writings and statements on his Websites and Weblogs, in Iran and fled the country through Turkey to save his life.

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