US refuses support to Iranian protestors

The Guardian recently asked, “Why are Americans ignoring the protests in Iran?”

Demonstrations of sympathy here have been organized by Iranian artists and activists in exile, while US politicians have largely remained silent.  In his 21 September address to the United Nations general assembly, Joe Biden expressed US solidarity with “the brave citizens and the brave women who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights” in a very brief coda to a very long address about Ukraine, Putin, world hunger and “our bold climate agenda”. [Emphases added].

Child murderers 

The Guardian noted the viciousness of the Iranian government while wondering why the protestors can’t get support like the Ukrainian government.

In fact so much of the speech was devoted to Ukraine that it made one speculate about how different things would be if we diverted a minuscule fraction of the economic, military and political support we are sending Ukraine to aid those fighting for “their basic rights” in Iran. . . .

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have begun targeting children. At least 58 young Iranians have been murdered, five of them within one recent week. The government seems to believe that terror for one’s children is the most effective way to keep dissidents at home and off the streets.

Media absent

Legacy media has helped the State Department avoid questions about its lack of support for the protests by largely ignoring it.

. . . much of this may come as a surprise to the average American. . . . Coverage of the uprising has been notably sporadic; we search our screens and front pages, mostly in vain. Watching the evening news, we wait for the brief clip from Tehran that follows celebrity gossip or the record-breaking snowstorm. 

Terrorizing the world

The Iranian regime, which the White House is in no rush to see replaced, infamously took 52 diplomats and staff from the U.S. embassy in Tehran hostage in 1979 for 444 days. The hostages were bound, beaten and held in solitary confinement in sometimes freezing cells. Since the hostage crisis, little has changed to create a more benign image, as reflected in a government report on the rogue state. 

. . . the State Department said Iran was the planet’s “foremost” state sponsor of terrorism in 2016, a dubious distinction the country has held for many years. It said Iran was firm in its backing of . . . proxies that have destabilized already devastating conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. . . . And, it said Iranian support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement was unchanged. In terms of non-state actors, the report said the Islamic State group was responsible for more attacks and deaths than any other group in 2016, and was seeking to widen its operations . . .

Obama too

Despite the terrorizing of its own citizens and the rest of the world, America remains on the sidelines as Iranians seek freedom. In fact, this is not the first time Iranian protestors were denied US backing.

Barack Obama is said to have refused to support the 2009 protests in Iran – a decision he later called a mistake . . .

But State Department officials, and the media, were not always against pushing regime change in Iran.

Pro-America Iran

Often forgotten is the US position vis-a-vis Iran just before the hostage crisis, as recounted in an in-depth report on Iran.

Long regarded as a U.S. ally, the Shah [king of Iran] was pro-Western and anti-communist, and he was aware that he posed the main barrier to Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. . . . He determined to make Iran . . . capable of blocking a Russian advance until the West should realize to what extent her own interests were threatened and come to his aid . . . 

Pro-Israel Iran

Even more shocking, in light of today’s Iranian leadership, is Iran’s previous relationship with Israel.

A voice for stability within the Middle East itself, [the Shah] favored peace with Israel and supplied the beleaguered state with oil.

The Shah even honored Israelis, promoting their business opportunities in Iran.

Yehuda Artzieli, an Israeli businessman who lived in Tehran during the 1970s, describes a dinner held at the palace to which he was invited by the shah’s brother. According to Artzieli, the dinner looked as if it were taken from a chapter [in] Arabian Nights: four servants dressed in white with a golden belt opened the door for him, four other servants pulled out his chair for him. During dinner, the shah told Artzieli: “Here, in this room, there is no Islam.”

Overnight metamorphosis?

The Iranian people obviously did not transform overnight from friends of the West and Israel into their arch-enemies. Only the leaders changed, though from 6,000 miles away it’s easy to lump the citizenry and leadership together. But why did the king fall?

Benevolent king

The Shah was not just friendly to the West. His graciousness with his own countrymen is recounted.

Although Iran, also called Persia, was the world’s oldest empire, dating back 2,500 years, by 1900 it was floundering. Bandits dominated the land; literacy was one percent; and women, under archaic Islamic dictates, had no rights.

The Shah changed all this. Primarily by using oil-generated wealth, he modernized the nation. He built rural roads, postal services, libraries, and electrical installations. He constructed dams to irrigate Iran’s arid land, making the country 90-percent self-sufficient in food production. He established colleges and universities, and at his own expense, set up an educational foundation to train students for Iran’s future.

To encourage independent cultivation, the Shah donated 500,000 Crown acres to 25,000 farmers. In 1978, his last full year in power, the average Iranian earned $2,540, compared to $160 25 years earlier. Iran had full employment . . .

The Shah’s benevolence was noted for its reach to all Iranians.

. . . the Shah protected minorities and permitted non-Muslims to practice their faiths. “All faith,” he wrote, “imposes respect upon the beholder.” The Shah also brought Iran into the 20th century by granting women equal rights. This was not to accommodate feminism, but to end archaic brutalization.

Foreign politicians vs. Iranians

Despite the absence of any conditions for a rebellion, corrupt politicians in and out of Iran were determined to foment one.

. . . at the height of Iran’s prosperity, the Shah suddenly became the target of an ignoble campaign led by U.S. and British foreign policy makers. Bolstered by slander in the Western press, these forces, along with Soviet-inspired communist insurgents, and mullahs opposing the Shah’s progressiveness, combined to face him with overwhelming opposition. In three years he went from vibrant monarch to exile (on January 16, 1979), and ultimately death, while Iran fell to Ayatollah Khomeini’s terror.

Joining the smear was U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, whose role [former minister Houchang] Nahavandi recalled in a 1981 interview: “But we must not forget the venom with which Teddy Kennedy ranted against the Shah, nor that on December 7, 1977, the Kennedy family financed a so-called committee for the defense of liberties and rights of man in Teheran, which was nothing but a headquarters for revolution.”

Suddenly, the Shah noted, the U.S. media found him “a despot, an oppressor, a tyrant.” Kennedy denounced him for running “one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind.”

Media vs. Iranians

Legacy media aided politicians in painting the Shah as Iran’s enemy.

For Western TV cameras, protestors in Teheran carried empty coffins, or coffins seized from genuine funerals, proclaiming these were “victims of SAVAK.” This deception — later admitted by the revolutionaries — was necessary because they had no actual martyrs to parade. Another tactic: demonstrators splashed themselves with mercurochrome, claiming SAVAK had bloodied them.

The Western media cooperated. When Carter visited Iran at the end of 1977, the press reported that his departure to Teheran International Airport had been through empty streets, because the city was “all locked up and emptied of people, by order of the SAVAK.” What the media didn’t mention: Carter chose to depart at 6 a.m., when the streets were naturally empty.

Betrayal from within

Foreign politicians and media could not bring down the popular Shah without some assistance from within Iran. That assistance came from Iran’s communist Tudeh party, sometimes acting from within the government and sometimes banned, organized street riots.

At the center of the “human rights” complaints was the Shah’s security force, SAVAK. Comparable in its mission to America’s FBI, SAVAK was engaged in a deadly struggle against terrorism, most of which was fueled by the bordering USSR, which linked to Iran’s internal communist party, the Tudeh. SAVAK, which had only 4,000 employees in 1978, saved many lives by averting several bombing attempts. Its prisons were open for Red Cross inspections, and though unsuccessful attempts were made on the Shah’s life, he always pardoned the would-be assassins … [Emphasis added].

Riots organized by the communists found support among academics and activists on Iran’s Left.

Many of Imam Khomeini's political and religious ideas were considered to be progressive and reformist by leftist intellectuals and activists prior to the Revolution.

Socialist labor union leaders than joined in by calling for widespread strikes to further weaken the Shah:

Oil, coal and transport workers all struck, with the latter refusing to allow police and army to travel on the trains.

Iran vs. Iranians

The media, foreign politicians and Iran’s communist Tudeh party activists, Leftist academics and socialist unions and deep state combined efforts to force the Shah to flee his nation by providing  him the false hope of avoiding bloodshed amongst his people. The result, however, was that hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed after the Shah left while the survivors of the revolution were regularly subjected to torture and political execution, with more than 500 people executed in total in 2022.

Tehran’s frequent executions have rightly earned the enmity of the Iranian people,” said Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) Research Fellow Tzvi Kahn. 

The latest victim was executed . . . after a brief trial devoid of due process and rested on a confession elicited through torture . . . Iran is the world’s top executioner of juvenile offenders . . .

In a Fox News expose entitled, “Hell on Earth: Inside Iran's brutal Evin prison,” Gissou Nia, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, said:

To many Iranians, the concept of Evin prison is synonymous with political repression and torture. Today, anyone who is perceived to be a threat to the Iranian regime, including human rights defenders . . . is kept within the confines of Evin and other notorious prisons in Iran.

More betrayals

In addition to the US government’s role in the Iranian revolution, Frontline News recently reported on the US State Department’s betrayal of China, Taiwan and the Koreas. Are there more examples? Check back as we continue our series on how America’s foreign policy betrays domestic and foreign populations alike.