Wednesday, May 09, 2007

The External Threat Argument

I don't envy the Islamic regime's apologists and lobbyists, for although they have a lot of funds at their disposal, from Iranian government or the oil giants, they have a tall order. Islamic Republic is a religious dictatorship, where the rights of a citizen are determined by their religion or more accurately by their adherence to the state's interpretation of Shiite theology. Pure and simple, Islamic Republic is evil and wrong.

So how do these lobbyists and apologists cope with such a difficult task of window dressing the Islamic Republic? First of all they rely on the 'useful idiots' in the West. The same ones who tried to glamorise the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao. 'Useful idiots' are very active, and they seem to have a lot of time for activism. They are also experts in getting grants and funding. The army of 'useful idiots' as well as the funds at their disposal is their strength.

The Achilles heel of the IR apologists and lobbyists is their bankrupt arguments. One really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with a viable argument to defend the Islamic Republic. One of the pivotal arguments they have been posing is that while Iran is under external threat, the human rights abuses and all the other wrongs in the Islamic Republic should not be highlighted and we should all concentrate on fighting this external threat first and foremost. See CASMII's protest at a mild petition put up by Znet that mildly criticised the human rights abuses in Iran.

Now lets examine one of CASMII's leading members, Abbas Edalat. He was educated in the US after having received a scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation, i.e. from the Shah's regime. Yet this receiver of the scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation did not hesitate to campaign against the Shah's regime as a student.

Under the Shah, Iran was definitely under the external threat from two of its immediate neighbours, the Soviet Union and Iraq. The Russian ambitions to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf go back to Peter the Great's will and after the second World War, the Soviets tried to break up Iran by supporting and promoting a separatist movement in Azerbijan, North West Iran.

After their failure in Azerbijan, the Soviets continued their desires to turn Iran into a Russian satellite by supporting and funding the puppet pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and other insurgencies.
Programs by the Peyk Radio of the Tudeh Party, broadcast from Eastern Europe, continued to disseminate Soviet propaganda against the Shah’s regime.

Iraq's ambition on breaking away Khuzestan province from Iran was aided by Egypt's other Pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who referred to Iranian Khuzestan as Arabestan. Iraq also disputed the river borders of Arvand-rood, and on several occasions Saddam's forces attacked Iranian border posts only to be pushed back by the well organised Iranian army at the time.

So Iran was definitely under external threat at the time, yet students like Abbas Edalat studying abroad on a government grant, never considered that they should stop their activities against the Shah to combat the external threats. In fact many of them directly collaborated with the governments that posed that very external threat.

These students would be educated in US and Western European countries but for some peculiar reason then wanted an Albanian, Chinese, Algerian or some other tin-pot dictatorship styles for Iran! Patriotism to them was either a dirty word and just was not found in their vocabulary.

But all of a sudden now, their 'patriotism' is preventing them from criticising the Islamic Republic. The fact is that the Islamic Republic feels threatened even by its own shadow, and will always create an 'external threat' and an 'external enemy'. Islamic Republic craves and lives on crisis as a way of extending its shelf life.

After 28 years however, most Iranian people are seeing through these gimmicks and bluffs of the clerical state. They rightly demand their rights to a decent standard of living, their right to have a say in how they are governed, and their right to personal freedoms. I can not imagine how for example, Iranian teachers, who only demand the enactment of the Islamic Assembly bill for public workers, and nothing more, can be regarded as colluding with the 'external threat'?!
Nor indeed how Iranian women who want justice in state gender laws, nor the workers who demand their unpaid wages, nor any other stream of the Iranian pro-democracy movement, in any way are colluding with any external threats.

The argument to suppress home grown dissent because of external threats has been used by just about all dictatorships. If such an argument had any shred of consistency, Israel should be the most brutal dictatorship against its own citizens because of all the external threats it faces. Yet even during the missile attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah, some Israeli citizens felt free enough to demonstrate against the war and criticise their government. Imagine what would have happened if a group of Iranians protested in Iran, during the war with Iraq, and demanded that the Islamic Republic accepted the peace treaty that was on offer after the Iraqi aggressors had retreated from our borders.

Demanding justice at home not only does not promote external threats, but a perception of being able to campaign freely for justice and bring one's government to accountability actually strengthens one's resolve to defend the system against external threats.

The 'external threat' argument is so old, repetitive, bankrupt and baseless that only 'useful idiots' will be convinced by it. Any sane person can realise that the motivation for such arguments is more suspect than it appears on the surface and there is another agenda behind it.


Bahramerad said...

I consider people like Abbas Edalat of CASMII as noting other than traitors and opportunist FIFTH coloumists.
As you have perceptively pointed out, his records show that while he was enjoying the fruits of the labour and aspirations of Iranian nation who wanted IRAN to have an educated and successful population and had provided through the educational grants and students supports that the late Shah of Iran was extending to all Iranian students enrolled in Universities in Iran or abroad, all Mr. Edalat wanted to do was to overthrow that system.
The Mullah Mafia 'Fascist' state is full of these Motherf...ers.

Bijan said...

excellent post

Winston said...

Well, these idiots are also threats to Iran, just like their regime.

serendip said...

Thought provoking and insightful as always. I would add the religious factions/insugrents (stirred up by Egyptian Islamic Brotherood's Khomeini from Iraq under the uspieces of U.k. and France)...Did you know that the the clergies received a monthly stipend from the Shah too?
Shah should've never stopped their monthly salary and have them turn against him...I think Americans advisors told him to that because they wanted the Shah out and the Shah didn't know it yet...

Bahramerad said...

.comMr. Serendip
What really brought about the uprising of 1979 was the conspiracy of The Bankers (Rackefeller and Morgan) and the new Bankers, The 7 Oil Barons. The religion was just the cover, THE CHADOR, to muddy the waters. They used Saudi money.
Afterwards because Khomenie after succeeding in the uprising wanted to break his relationships with his masters, (Remember the Barzargan and the Algiers accord) that they set Saddam Hussain loss on him and then when he was nearly dying force on him the humiliation of drinking poison to hasten his departure. they WILL do the same to KHAMENI when the time is right. I am Sure.

Aryamehr said...

Thanks for posting this Potkin-jAn.

Plateau said...

Actually, there is an external threat as far as the people you’ve mentioned are concerned. That external threat is about the same old cliché: (a) their pocketbooks i.e. Money, and (b) Power. Of course, as a separate group, most “useful idiots” prefer to conceptualize with little reality check.

If tomorrow the same people were to come across another “State” - “ideology” or "regime" that better served their purpose, as in (a) and (b), they would jump ship in a heartbeat.

Regarding what I think serendip is, partly, alluding to i.e. "religious insurgents & Muslim Brotherhood" and Nasser, read this

serendip said...

P: That is exactly what I was trying to get across. thx.

Nader Yazdani said...

I dont know how some people are trying to justify external trheat as a reson for crackdown in Iran, when Ahmadi-Nejad himself does not belive US has the capability to attack Iran:

serendip said...

Nader Yazdani: All repressive regimes are congenitally paranoid...The Regime was paranoid when it massacred more than 50,000 political prisoners in Evin, mostly young kids, in 1987 and dumped their body in a mass grave. All the assassinations abroad and so on illustrates the regime is fully aware that it's foundations are built on sand and they're temporary occupants of a sand castle.

Hidden Author said...

Serendip, you act as if the opposition is a valuable tool for undermining the regime. But can the opposition really help the West deal with Islamic extremism in Iran? I'm sure that the IRI will *eventually* be destroyed by the opposition--but how long will it take? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? It might even take *1000 years* and so the West is in need of a swifter, more effective means of restraining IRI terrorism than the means provided by the opposition!