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| Iranian leadership |
West, Israel major sources of oppression: Larijani
Thu Jul 5, 2012 11:57AM GMT(H/T Challah Hu Akbar)
Iran’s Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani has described the West and the Israeli regime as the major sources of oppression in the current era, saying that time has come for their existence to cease. “Today, the time has come for the disappearance of the West and the Zionist regime (Israel) - which are two dark spots in the present era - from the face of the universe,” said Larijani in a Thursday conference in Tehran... The US and the Zionist regime are the prime sources of tyranny and gloom in the current age. The Muslim world is fed up with the injustice and abuse by these governments... [T]he West and the Zionist regime are attempting to lead Islam toward deviation...” He also highlighted the West’s meddling in Syria and reiterated that Western interference in the Arab country “is merely due to Syrian resistance against the Zionist regime; the US, therefore, tries to employ such notions as reforms to harm the resistance front in this nation.”
Who is Larijani? Wikipedia calls him a philosopher and politician who holds a Ph.D. in "Western philosophy" from Tehran University. He has been called "a relative moderate who struggled fiercely against the uncompromising agenda of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" [see this Los Angeles Times Service article "Larijani, moderate Iranian, quits post"] and more recently the Financial Times ["Iranian moderate re-elected as speaker"] called him "a moderate politician known for his opposition to Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s president".
In the Arabic media, they tend to speak more forthrightly about their fears over Iran's growing belligerence. An Al Arabiya item from May 2012 calls Larijani
"a loquacious 55-year-old regime insider whose brothers also hold key posts [and] seen as close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei... Larijani’s family is a pillar of the Islamic establishment. His younger brother, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, is the head of Islamic republic’s judiciary. His elder brother, Mohammad Javad, is an advisor to Khamenei."So when this "philosphical" "moderate" says of "the West" and of Israel that the "time has come for their existence to cease" we're going to go with the world's leading Western voices and assume he means this in the strictly moderate sense of the expression.
As for the report in March quoting Supreme Iranian Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed”, he was surely speaking metaphorically.
And we will look the other way when Reuters reports, as it did this past Wednesday, on a speech by Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards aerospace division speaking about the United States presence in the area:
“These bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands (Israel) are also good targets for us”... Haji Zadeh said 35 US bases were within reach of Iran’s ballistic missiles, the most advanced of which commanders have said could hit targets 2,000 km away. “We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack...”However all is not gloom and doom. There's this from Wednesday:
EU Plans to Continue Nuke Talks With Iran
The European Union said it will hold further talks with Iran on the country's nuclear program, following a one-day technical-level meeting between the international community and Tehran in Istanbul. No date has been set yet for the talks, which will be between Iran's deputy nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri, and his EU counterpart, Helga Schmid, the EU said Wednesday. An EU official said they expect a time to be agreed in the coming days. At Tuesday's Istanbul talks, the two sides shared details of their proposals for resolving the nuclear standoff, "and the experts explored positions on a number of technical subjects," EU foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement.Exploring technical positions sounds good, no?
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