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| Ebrahim Raisi at the United Nations, 20 September 2023 Click above for the full video (36’) |
I’ve been catching up on the UN speech of the recently deceased Iranian PM, Ebrahim Raisi. Him who died in that helicopter crash in northwestern Iran.
At the beginning he talks of family and I rather liked that bit. The importance of family, of mother and father, how we must promote it. Horrah, say I.
And a lot of the rest of his speech certainly sounds peaceful and peaceable. Iran as the great peacemaker in the region. “Neighbourliness and Integration”.
Everyone else is responsible for terrorism, just not Iran. Which only wants peace, we must remember. Peace in the region of Iran and West Asia.
At the end there are the obligatory backhanders to the US, which of course is the Great Satan, responsible for all the harm in the world. There is no terrorism in the region save for the US. No mention of the half million killed in the Syria war. Or of the war in Yemen, with the Houthis that Iran funds.
And also note this: that it was less than three weeks later that Hamas -- accompanied by local Gazan citizens -- invaded Israel, killed over 1,200 Israelis, raped numerous women and stole 240 hostages, in the bloodiest act agains the Jews since the Holocaust. This was all done under the watchful eye of President Mr Nice Guy, Raisi. He was the one who coordinated all the various terror troups in the region, Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi, who get their money and their marching orders from Iran, which is to say from Ebrahim Raisi. So all that warm and wonderful talk, as if we needed reminder, was just so much duplicity and deception.
Then at the end, the real kicker: “You are the past and we are the future”. “I repeat once again, they [ie, US and Europe] represent the past and we represent the future”.
That kind of reminded me of the time Nikita Khrushchev took off his shoe at the United Nations, banged it on the table and said “We will bury you”, meaning the capitalist west. Let’s hope, or at least I hope, that Raisi is as wrong about the future as was Khrushchev because a future under a world of Islamic Theocracy will hardly be worth living, unless as a member of the priesthood, as a sheikh and that’s only available to men. No wonder the women of Iran were especially thrilled at his death the other day.
Which brings me to the reactions of the western governments. Which have been uniformly pretty horrid. We had he United Nations Security Council standing for a minute of silence. The US Senate did the same, which I find totally inexplicable. The EU was its usual cowardly self, sending a maudlin message of condolences to the families of the dead, and what about to the Iranian people, I’m thinking.
Well, one old turtle got it right:
Ex Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell:
I too would like to extend my condolences to the people of Iran for their long suffering under the brutal, theocratic rule of the Islamic Republic,” he said. “I suspect agreat many Iranians would rather Western admirers stop lionizing a man known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ for executing political prisoners. They might prefer that foreign leaders not further legitimize the regime that actively represses all of them.”
And we used not to be so fawning at the deaths of murderous tyrants:
President Bill Clinton on the death of Pol Pot:
April 16, 1998The death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot has again brought to international attention one of the most tragic chapters of inhumanity in the twentieth century. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers transformed Cambodia into the killing fields, causing the death of an estimated 2 million of their countrymen in a brutal attempt to transform Cambodian society. More...
Could we not have a bit more of that reality and dignity? Instead of saccharine statements about a dictator who spent his life murdering idealistic Iranian youth, trying to bring down the “Great Satan” and to take over the west?
