Ebrahim Raisi, who is one of the people responsible for the murder of 5,000 dissidents in Iran in 1988, became the president of the Islamic Republic on Tuesday. On the same day, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Twitter considers less of a threat to the peace of the world than Donald Trump, tweeted: “Today, our dear country is thirsty for valuable service & it needs competent, jihadi, intelligent, courageous management that can use the manifest and hidden capabilities of the nation, which are much greater in scope than the problems, for constructive work and endeavor.” In Raisi, it looks as if Khamenei has just the competent, jihadi leadership he is looking for, although Biden’s handlers don’t seem concerned in the least: They’re still indefatigably pursuing a new nuclear deal with Iran. What could possibly go wrong?
“Jihadi,” of course, is a word capable of varying interpretations. “Jihad” in Arabic means struggle, and there are as many kinds of jihad in the Arabic and Islamic worlds as there are different kinds of struggles in English. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran itself has a Department of Agricultural Jihad, which has nothing to do with blowing things up on the farm, but simply with struggling to increase the productivity and efficiency of the nation’s agricultural sector.
But Khamenei, as a Shi’ite cleric, knows well that the primary meaning of “jihad” in Islamic theology and law is warfare against unbelievers for the ultimate purpose of subjugating them under the hegemony of Islamic law. There is no doubt that the Islamic Republic has been behaving lately as if it had that warfare as a high priority. Last week there was the attack on an oil tanker managed by an Israeli firm, in which two people were killed. Then there are Iran’s plans, recently discovered, to hack into infrastructure in Western countries.
There was also the outrageous plan, revealed in mid-July, to kidnap an Iranian dissident, Masih Alinejad, in New York City and take her back to the Islamic Republic, where she would almost certainly have been imprisoned and tortured, and possibly even killed. Meanwhile, Iran has been using a mosque in Hamburg, Germany as a propaganda center to export its Islamic revolution to Europe.
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Amid all this, Iranian officials are confident of ultimate victory – not least because of the dementia-ridden puppet in the Oval Office. Hassan Danaeifar, the former Iranian ambassador to Iraq, recently boasted in an interview on Iranian television that “American society has encountered serious problems. There is serious polarization.” Danaeifar was struck by Old Joe’s weakness and passivity: “I believe that that current president is not a two-term president. He is a president who cannot make decisions. The Americans have been unable to make a decision with regard to Syria. They have made half decisions and failed to accomplish their plans – not only in Iraq, with regard to ISIS, but also in Syria, and in Lebanon. When we examine the region, we see that on various issues, the Americans have taken a passive position. This passive position spells the imminent collapse of America. You can rest assured [about that]. You and I have witnessed the fall of the Shah and that of the USSR, and we shall witness the fall of America.”
We’ll see about that. But Iran’s war footing against the United States goes back to the beginnings of the Islamic Republic in 1979, and it has frequently reiterated its hostility and belligerent goals since then, as The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran details. For years, Iranian leaders have engaged in extremely bellicose rhetoric against the U.S. On February 11, 2014, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, Iranian Chief of Staff Hassan Firouzabadi boasted: “Iran is prepared for the decisive war against the U.S. and the Zionist regime.…Iran has been making plans, conducting maneuvers, and preparing its forces for this battle for years now.”
In May 2014, senior Iranian commander Massoud Jazayeri warned that if the U.S. attacked Iran, not only would the result be “the annihilation of the Israeli regime,” but war in the U.S. itself: “[The Americans] know that aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran would mean annihilation of Tel Aviv and spread of war into the United States.” Fadavi added the following during an interview at that time: “Today the Americans and the entire world know that one of our operational goals is destroying U.S. Navy Forces.”
In May 2015, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Hossein Salami actually said that Iran wanted war with the United States: “We have prepared ourselves for the most dangerous scenarios and this is no big deal and is simple to digest for U.S.; we welcome war with the U.S. as we do believe that it will be the scene for our success to display the real potentials of our power.”
Nothing has changed in the intervening years. And with “competent, jihadi, intelligent, courageous leadership” in Tehran, and a gang of deceivers, wishful thinkers, weaklings, woke fanatics, and appeasers in the White House, things could get very ugly in the near future.
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