Forty years ago, mullah Khomeini and his zealous followers, including fanatic religious leaders and communist parties, with the assistance and desire of some foreign governments, regretfully overthrew the late Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last in a line of Persian monarchs dating back to Cyrus the Great nearly 2600 years ago, and enforced a stone age Islamic regime. Today, a great majority of Iranian people are fed up with the backward, scowling, corrupt, terrorist, and prejudiced clerics who have robbed their country and have killed their countrymen and women.
For forty years the Islamic regime has systematically ignored the basic human rights of the Iranian people. The regime even restricts citizens’ right to change their local government by voting. The regime also manipulates the electoral system and represses political dissidents such as academics, human rights defenders, environmentalists, journalists, filmmakers, social-media users and bloggers. Systematic abuses include extrajudicial killings and summary executions, disappearances, widespread use of torture and other degrading treatments, harsh prison conditions, arbitrary arrests and detention, lack of due process, unfair trials, infringement on citizens’ privacy, and restrictions on freedom of speech, press, assembly, associating, and religion. And most of all, each year thousands of Iranians are executed by the clergies in Iran, accused of being agents of enemies, non-Shiites and believers of other religions, drug traffickers, and so on.
In the middle of last December the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution about the violations of human rights that is practiced daily in Iran. The resolution particularly conveyed serious concern about ongoing severe limitations and restrictions on the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. Therefore, the presently so-called “reformist” Islamic government is propaganda and myth, and clearly the regime survives by brutality against its people.
February 11th marks the fortieth anniversary of the so-called Islamic revolution. Since then, clergies have ruled by terror and bloodshed. And all these years nothing has changed, and executions by the Islamic regime have continued to mount.
All human rights supporters’ organizations including Amnesty International time and again have published reports on Iran. The reports show that executions of political opponents and non-Shiite believers by the Islamic regime in the last forty years have resulted in the torture and death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people without any semblance of due process.
Islamic laws governing the country have violated practically every provision of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Islamic rulers proudly ridicule the concept of universal human rights, branding it a tool of Western evils. Anybody that questions the views of Islamic clergies is immediately labeled as an enemy of God with links to the great Satan (reference to the United States) and must be killed. The root of the problem in Iran definitely is the regime itself.
For the past forty years, the Islamic revolution designed a state that the leader in command and the clergies around him run by way of enforcing religious laws. Mullah Khamenei, who is now in command as Supreme Leader of the country, like his predecessor Supreme Leader mullah Khomeini, has stacked the state bureaucracies with faithful clerics and drenched the society and the media with his personal doctrines. After purging the military and security services, these two leaders rebuilt them to ensure their loyalty to the clerical state. Furthermore, for the past forty years, the officials of the Islamic regime applaud the heroism of the “martyrs” of those terrorist acts around the world. To fanatical clergies in Tehran, terrorism is a legitimate political tool, justified by a higher cause. Therefore, the training and financial support of them is a religious duty.
The father of the Islamic revolution mullah Khomeini also launched a campaign to export his Islamic ideology to neighboring Muslim countries. His provocation of Iraq in 1980 helped to begin a losing war that lasted eight years, at the cost of a million lives. His believers asked whether God had revoked His blessing of the Islamic revolution to which Khomeini responded that he “had promised to fight to the last drop of his blood and his last breath”. Changing this decision, he said “was more deadly than taking poison.”
Nevertheless, Khomeini’s single-minded determination to prolong the Iran-Iraq war at all costs was an indication of clergies’ frustration, even depression, with their abject failure to export their revolution. Their willingness to negotiate an arms deal with the “Great Satan” and to take delivery of the arms through the good offers of the “junior Satan”, Israel, whose capital they have promised to “liberate”, betrayed this desperation.
Clearly, the Islamic regime’s gift to Iranian people and the world for the past forty years has been terror, pure indiscriminate terror, at home and abroad. Terror for the sake of the turban clad madmen who made a mockery out of everything civilized and human. However, with the recent continuous uprisings, and systematic executions by the regime, the whole world has witnessed the bitter reality of the so-called “Government of Law”, “Civil Society”, “Islamic democracy” and so on that are promised by the regime’s current president mullah Rouhani.
Although Iran is rich in natural resources, sitting atop a huge oil and gas reserve, the Iranian people remain poor, and presently the majority are living under the poverty line, and of course with no liberty. The enormous loss of investment in the public sector undermines Iranians’ rights to health and education. Tens of millions of its impoverished live without access to decent food, basic services and necessities. The reason is that corrupt Islamic regime officials including high-ranking clergies siphon billions of dollars from public coffers. The Islamic government of course denies Iranian access to real basic information about petroleum revenues and other sources of income. Therefore, it makes it impossible for citizens to monitor spending and hold their so-called Islamic government accountable. To mislead the public, now and then the regime’s officials announce the arrest of an official or rich person, labeling him or her as a thief and corrupt.
Iran, unlike the other troubled spots of the world, derives its sovereignty from over 7,000 years of recorded cultural existence, and more than 5,000 years of nationhood. Iran as an empire, a kingdom, and a people has left its mark on the world’s evolution of civilization. Today, however, all that is sacred to the identity of an entire people is on the verge of total annihilation, as the Islamic regime continues to plunder the historic nation, and rob from it all the elements that have safeguarded Iran’s sovereignty and integrity through many turbulent times.
Nevertheless, the period of democracy has come, and the period of Islamic mullahs and militias is ending. Eighty million Iranians are fed up with the scowling clerics who have ruined their country and their lives. Iranian people are tired of so much austerity. They want freedom and levity in their lives. The serious dissatisfaction has boiled recently to the streets across the country.
Now, it is time that the free world helps in the struggle of the oppressed Iranian people. The free world can help them rid their country of this murderous calamity and pursue regime change, so that they may once again gain a respectable position in the world.
The question remains of what must be done. Europe must inject a sense of urgency into its current policy toward Iran. For forty years, while the Islamic regime has continued its aggressive efforts on its neighboring countries in the Middle East, Europe has shown no comprehensive strategy, no coherent long range blueprint regarding the terrorist Islamic regime. However, the European Union recently became aware that the leader of the Islamic regime in Tehran attempted terrorist attacks and assassinations in Europe. Killing of Iranian dissidents in Denmark and the Netherlands, and plots to bomb an Iranian opposition rally in Paris last year were reported. Although for a long time Europe has tried to circumvent penalties against the Islamic regime, in early January out of desperation the European Union finally sanctioned the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, as well as a few of the regime’s senior officials. Europe should advocate the overthrow of the regime in Iran and not demoralize the growing secular opposition by negotiating an EU-Iran trade mechanism, officially known as Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), with the terrorist blackmail school of Islamic diplomacy.
It is time for the free nations of the world to make the oppressed Iranian people the focus of their foreign policy, not economic benefits. They should adopt at least a unified policy to pressure and punish the Islamic regime, just as they did in response to South African apartheid
Therefore, in light of the people’s demonstrations that have rocked the Islamic regime’s foundation in the last couple years, a new approach by the civilized world is required. What the free world, particularly the United States and European Union, should do is pay more attention to the Iranian people, especially the democratic dissidents who have been forced underground or into exile. No countries, including Russia, China, and a few European countries, for the sake of economic advantage should demoralize the ever growing secular opposition by appearing to give in to the Islamic Republic’s fabricated diplomacy. The bottom line is the democratic world should be advocating the overthrow of the Islamic regime.
Source » eurasiareview