September 12-14
The Islamic Republic has gone off on a rhetorical tangent accusing the United States of having created terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda and inserted them into the Middle East to do America’s dirty work.
For the last two weeks, officials high and low and clerics of all ranks have been selling this line to the Iranian people. A parallel line is that the United States is lying outright when it claims to be fighting terrorism.
Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, one of the many pursuing this line, said, “History shows that the first terrorists in the world and in the region are the superpowers themselves.” Terrorism, however, is as old as the hills and predates the existence of the United States by millennia.
Larijani said, “You will never be upset about terrorism and you are lying because you yourselves were the founders of terrorism in the region.”
PressTV, the English language arm of state broadcasting, said the United States had been silent for years about the Islamic State and its predecessors and only began to speak out after the Islamic State beheaded two American journalists. The Islamic State was originally Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and was founded primarily to kill American soldiers in Iraq.
The rhetoric has been given a boost by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi, who said last week, “Although the Western countries, especially the United States, claim they have nothing to do with these groups [Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State], there is ample evidence suggesting these movements have been created by the Western powers and their regional clients.”
Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said, “The takfiri terrorist groups that do not hold any belief in any religion or faith are the main tool [used by the West] to confront the Islamic Awakening,” which is what Iran prefers to call the Arab Spring.
Deputy Alaeddin Borujerdi, the chairman of the Majlis National Security Committee, said, “No doubt the Americans should be blamed for the creation of the Islamic State and takfiri terrorists. They [the Americans] have announced many times that they are supplying these people with training and weapons.” Actually, Obama has refused suggestions to arm them.
Borujerdi said, “The Americans do not care about the beheading of thousands of people who are killed [by the Islamic State] and this is a crime that will be recorded in the history of humanity.”
At Friday prayers last week, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami condemned the massacres of innocent people by terrorist groups in Iraq and said, “The support given by you [Western powers] to the takfiri terrorists will backfire on you and you will see the repercussions soon.”
And Brigadier General Hossain Salami, the number two officer in the Pasdaran, said, “Now you [Americans] see that the phenomenon you created, namely the Islamic State, has turned into a cancerous tumor for Americans.”