Left: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s post-Iran deal twitter graphic.
Seeking the Jewish votes and its financial support, presidential candidate Barack Obama told AIPAC, on June 8, 2008: “The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.” Once in office, President Obama no longer spoke of eliminating, but of “preventing” the threat, of holding it at bay as long as he’s president. In addition to Obama’s reckless “Après moi, le [nuclear] déluge” attitude, it is not clear that Ayatollah Kahmenei, who reportedly suffers from an advanced prostate cancer, is willing to wait that long. And what better way to cement his legacy than using such as weapon?
Concerned with his own legacy, Obama is campaigning to prevent a veto in Congress. He has been calling his opponents everything from being ignorant to purely partisan to being warmongers to accusing the Jews among them as having “dual loyalty.”
The President has also been arguing that all the world, except Congressional opponents and Israel’s prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi), has accepted his position.
Incredibly, in an effort to justify Obama’s bad deal with Iran, his minions are now saying that Obama only tried to please Bibi. On Sunday, Larry Gellman, a Tucson based activist of J Street – the anti-Israeli, virulently anti-Bibi organization – called the Middle East Radio Forum, implying Obama has done this deal because Bibi asked him(!)
On Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show on Sunday, Obama said that the United States’ role in global politics is on the line as Congress votes on the Iran nuclear deal: “Does the rest of the world take seriously the United States’ ability to craft international agendas, to reach international agreements, to deliver on them in ways that garner the respect and the adherence from other countries?” he asked. Strange question coming from the president who from his first day in office, has made it his mission to undermine U.S. credibility.
Meanwhile, the Iranians continue to dispute Obama’s version of the deal. Fars News has been carrying statements by the Ayatollah and others religious and military leaders of the regime that contradict the U.S. interpretation of the nuclear deal. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht Ravanchi is quoted as saying “There is a paragraph in the agreement which requires the US administration to stop implementation of the sanctions (against Iran) constantly [sic? “instantly”?] and this means that there won’t be a change once (US President Barack) Obama leaves the office.”
Ravanchi, playing into Obama’s case for the Iran deal, also said (paraphrased by Fars News), “it is unlikely that anyone in the US or any other country decides to veto the nuclear agreement between Iran and the world powers which was also approved by the UN Security council, and “such a mistake will put Washington against the UN and will isolate the US.”
The Iranian leadership has not stopped contradicting most of what Obama has argued about the prospects for regional cooperation and the stabilization of the Middle East thank to the Iran deal. According to Fars News, on August 9, while addressing a meeting on the Iran deal, Zarif: ”We have announced that our defense capability will continue unharnessed and our arms aids to our allies will continue too.” He also credited only Iran for keeping ISIS out of Baghdad and disparaging the U.S. role in Iraq.
Moreover, according to an editorial in the conservative daily paper Javan, according to the Iranian constitution and the Qur’an, the Iranian Republic was committed to supporting Muslims in other countries and “the oppressed of the world.”
While the focus is on the nuclear deal, the president and his supporters also ignore the vast uptick in aggressive propaganda and behavior on the part of the Iranians regarding the United States and its role in the Middle East.
Most egregious has been Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s “Obama suicide” twitter graphic. The graphic shows a silhouette of Obama with a gun to his head, accompanied by the text, “We welcome no war, nor do we initiate any war, but if any war happens, the one who will emerge loser will be the aggressive and criminal U.S.
Obama’s reaction? Obama told Fareed Zakaria that Khamenei’s tweet is the result of the Supreme Leader’s fear of U.S. response if Iran violates the agreement. He went on to dismiss Khamenei’s vitriolic attacks on America as mere rhetoric. “The Supreme Leader is a politician, apparently, just like everybody else.”