|
TOP STORIES
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday criticized
the U.S. presidential candidates' behavior during their recent
debates. "Did you see the debate and the way of their speaking,
accusing and mocking each other? Do we want such a democracy in our
country? Do we want such elections in our country?" Rouhani
said, speaking to a crowd in the Iranian city of Arak. "You see
the United States that claims it has had democracy for more than 200
years," he said in comments broadcast live by state TV.
"Look at the country, what the situation is where morality has
no place." Rouhani said that during his September visit to the
UN General Assembly, he was asked which of the candidates he
preferred. "I said what? Should I prefer bad to worse or worse
to bad?" Iran's state TV has broadcast two of the debates
between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in full. It has closely
followed the campaign, often highlighting economic and social
problems in the U.S. and the most confrontational debate segments.
It fell to Babak Namazi to break the news to his
mother last week that his brother and elderly father had been
sentenced in an Iranian court for "collaboration" with a
hostile government, the United States. He returned home and walked
around the block to compose himself. But his mother took one look at
his crestfallen face, and knew. "How many years?" she
asked. It was 10 years, a term that Namazi fears his ailing,
80-year-old father will not survive. His concern led him to break a
year's silence, against his mother's wishes, to plead in his first
interview for Iran to release his brother, Siamak, and their father,
Baquer, on humanitarian grounds. "I was hoping this would not
get to the point where I have to speak publicly," he said in a
telephone interview from his home in Dubai in the United Arab
Emirates. "I was hoping justice would prevail and the truth
would become obvious. Now that my father's convicted to 10 years, I
see this as nothing short of a life sentence."
Minister Schultz van Haegen (Infrastructure and the
Environment) will visit Iran from Sunday 23 to Friday 28 October,
accompanied by a delegation of Dutch companies. With this visit, the
Minister intends to strengthen the economic ties in order for the
Dutch companies to gain access to the Iranian market... The trade
delegation will meet with Iranian Ministries in Teheran, and Dutch
companies will meet with their Iranian counterparts. These meetings
are aimed at promoting mutual collaboration. The schedule also
features a visit to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas... With respect
to the ports and port development component, the Minister will be
accompanied by the following companies: BAM International, Damen
Shipyards, Port of Rotterdam, Royal Boskalis Westminster, Royal IHC,
STC Groep, Van Oord, and Witteveen + Bos. The following companies
will address the water component of the trade mission: Adverio Waste
systems, Amstelland, Berson UV, Dutch Water Authorities, Interact
Smart Solutions, Witteveen + Bos, and the Netherlands Water Partnership.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS
A Florida man imprisoned in Iran before being released
as part of a prisoner swap earlier this year has filed a
multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Iranian government. Farzad
N. Khosravi of Marco Island, Florida, filed the lawsuit Monday in
federal court in the District of Columbia, seeking more than $40
million. Khosravi was identified by officials as Nosratollah
Khosravi-Roodsari when he was one of four Americans released in
January. The lawsuit says Khosravi left Iran and was granted
political asylum in the U.S. in 1982 but returned to Iran in 2012.
The lawsuit says Iranian government officials initially confiscated
his passports but later returned them, but when he tried to leave in
2015 he was imprisoned and tortured.
CONGRESSIONAL ACTION
A new ad from the advocacy group 45Committee calls for
Americans to support extending the Iran Sanctions Act sponsored by
House and Senate Republicans. The ad details Iran's status as the
world's largest state sponsor of terrorism that is responsible for
the deaths of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and, citing
Washington Free Beacon reporting, has nuclear ambitions. "The
Obama administration's Iranian nuclear deal gave them billions,"
the narrator says. "Now, making it worse, the Iranian Sanctions
Act is set to expire. We can't let that happen." The narrator
implores viewers to call President Obama and remind him "it's
never too late to do the right thing" and support the extension.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte's (R., N.H.) bill extends the law through 2031,
according to Reuters, and would require new sanctions on Iran's
ballistic missile activity.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Iran's Foreign Ministry says an Iranian delegation
composed of deputy foreign ministers are to hold general talks with
European Union (EU) officials in Brussels in December. Ministry
Spokesman Bahram Qassemi announced the prospective negotiations on
Monday, saying the talks will cover a range of issues, possibly human
rights, but asserted that the delegation would not be comprising a
human rights team. "Our ties with Europe are fundamental and
age-old and we have numerous commonalities and can even differ on
issues that have to do with values and regional affairs," he
said... "Our outlook on the issue of human rights through [the
prism of] Islam has a special characteristic, which may not be
comprehensible to some of them (the Europeans); [but] we can hear
about their outlook and tell them about ours, too," the Iranian
official said.
HUMAN RIGHTS
The families of two British-Iranian dual-nationals
jailed in Iran are calling on the UK government to do more to secure
their release. Richard Ratcliffe and Kamran Foroughi will hand in
petitions to Downing Street and the Foreign Office on Monday on
behalf of Ratcliffe's wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and Foroughi's
father, Kamal Foroughi... On Monday Ratcliffe and Kamran Foroughi
will take a 72,000-signature Amnesty petition to the Foreign Office
asking the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, to prioritise
Zaghari-Ratcliffe's case as well as that of fellow UK-Iranian
dual-national Kamal Foroughi.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
With Iran's former chief executive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
effectively out of the picture after being "advised" by the
Supreme Leader not to enter the 2017 election, observers across the
globe have been breathlessly arguing that President Hassan Rouhani's
path to victory has been cleared. For instance, Iranian scholar, Ali
Omidi, wrote this month that "all the political conditions for
the smooth re-election of Rouhani seem to be in place." But such
prognostications overlook three main factors that will continue to
plague President Rouhani for the duration of his term--the targeting
of his cabinet; the imprisonment of dual-nationals and political
dissidents; and the doubling down of Tehran in its regional and terrorist
machinations. All undermine the confidence at home and abroad in
President Rouhani's ability to lead beyond the confines of the
nuclear file. A fifth column of conservative forces has routinely
attempted to uproot members of the Rouhani administration... Like
Khatami's thwarted attempts to ease the domestic repression that is
rampant in the country, such an abrupt departure casts doubt on
Rouhani's ability to further deliver on the expansion of social
freedoms he promised during his 2013 campaign--potentially weakening
enthusiasm among reformists... While it is unknown who will be the
conservative standard-bearer in the 2017 elections, President
Rouhani's reelection prospects are far from certain. Next spring is a
lifetime in the political life of any country, including Iran, and
Hassan Rouhani's enemies have plenty of time to continue their
campaign to hamstring his political potential.
Until recently, the United States had a firm policy of
never paying ransom for hostages on the sensible view that it would
encourage more kidnappings. Then came the Iran nuclear deal-and a
lesson in the human costs of President Obama's foreign policy. We say
this following Tuesday's news that an Iranian court has sentenced
Iranian-Americans Siamak Namazi and his 80-year-old father Baquer to
10 years in prison on trumped-up espionage charges. The younger Mr.
Namazi, a businessman, was arrested last September, shortly after the
nuclear deal was finalized. His father, a retired United Nations
official, was arrested in February while visiting his son in prison. At
least one other Iranian-American, Reza Shahini of San Diego, was
arrested earlier this year, and former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who
vanished in Iran in 2007, has never been accounted for. Tehran has a
long history of imprisoning Iranian-Americans on spurious charges,
often for domestic political reasons. But the $1.7 billion cash
payment they received in January on the same day they released the
last batch of U.S. hostages has created an incentive for them to
imprison more Americans to trade for some future concession.
Much more befitting of the power and history of the
U.S. and its allies would be to sever and destroy the toxic,
threatening bridge that Iran has built from Afghanistan to the
Mediterranean, with, astoundingly, the patronage of the president of
the United States. Anchored by soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, an integrated
politico-religious-military front including Shiite-directed Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon will emerge in the near future if current
trajectories remain undisturbed. This entity will have a population
almost half that of the United States; the immense oil wealth of Iran
and Iraq; ports on the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and Indian
Ocean; nuclear weapons; ICBMs; and, until it will no longer need
Russia, for which it has no brief, the mischievous and destructive
cooperation of Vladimir Putin. If, under the discipline of an Iran
drunk with its successful bamboozling of the West, this power turns
its eyes south to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East will be
entirely transformed... Now we are blinded to Iran in favor of
ISIS-in its horror and sensationalism the matador's red cape that
distracts from the truly mortal threat, the sword. We know that the
Iranians are skillfully using this dynamic. The question is, given
Mr. Obama's seemingly inexplicable yet indefatigable sponsorship of
Iran, and his slow-motion approach to ISIS, is he using it as well?
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment