November 29 2013
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi unleashed a ferocious anti-foreign diatribe last week—but coupled it with a strong endorsement of Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with the West.
Many commentators said the speech broke new ground and represented a new high in animosity for the Western world.
But the speech was very much like one he gave earlier this month, coupling vicious anti-American rhetoric with an endorsement of President Rohani’s new foreign policy.
Some political observers saw considerable political sophistication in Khamenehi’s speeches. He was conveying firm hostility for hated foreigners—in other words, tossing out red meat to his political base—while at the same time deftly shifting the country’s foreign policy in an entirely new direction.
And the foreign policy shift was made even clearer when Khamenehi this week endorsed the nuclear agreement with the Big Six immediately after it was announced.
Normally, Khamenehi disappears and remains mute for a few days after any major event. Only after he has had time to judge the public reaction will he normally speak out.
But this time, Khamenehi spoke out both swiftly and clearly, sending a message to the political elite that he expected it to fall in line quickly and support the nuclear agreement.
But he made sure to cover his hardline base last week with language that could be described as crude and base.
The rhetoric that got the most media attention was his use of the phrase “filthy, rabid dog.” The initial news reports had him calling Israel a “rabid dog.” The transcript, however, made clear that it was Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu he was calling a “rabid dog.”
In Israel, Netanyahu told the public that Khamenehi had called Jews “rabid dogs.” Netanyahu said, “He called Jews ‘rabid dogs’ and said they were not humanÖ. Doesn’t this sound familiar to you?” a reference to Adolf Hitler. “This is the real Iran.”
That twisting of words to shift them from a condemnation of a person to a condemnation of a people is something well-known in the Islamic Republic. Just last month, after US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman charged that “deception” was built into the DNA of Iranian officials, the Iranian media told the public that Sherman called all Iranians liars.
It is important to note that Khamenehi’s audience last week was not an ordinary gathering of citizens. He spoke instead to an assemblage of 50,000 Basijis crammed into the new Tehran covered prayer ground. It was audience designed to hear red meat rhetoric.
Khamenehi took on France, the latest country to achieve hated status in the Islamic Republic for its demands to tighten the nuclear proposal to Iran. Khamenehi said French officials are “not only succumbing to the United States, but they are kneeling down before the Zionist regime.”
French government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem labeled such rhetoric “unacceptable.” French President Francois Hollande later said, “Iran must offer answers and not a certain number of provocative statements.”
Khamenehi accused the Western countries of making increasing threats against Iran, which he said proved that the sanctions had not been effective against Iran and the Western powers knew that.
He said, “Instead of threatening other countries, go and deal with your wretched economic conditions and think of your debts.”
He said the Islamic Republic holds nothing but hostility for “global arrogance,” he preferred phrase—taken from the Qoran—applied to the West in general and the United States in particular.
He said, “In today’s world, America heads global arrogance. The arrogant powers have created a dangerous and false equation in international relations in which they see themselves as the upper caste and deem others as peripheral.
He said it was the United States that dropped atomic weapons on Japan, supported Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and shot down an Iranian civilian airliner.
He dismissed the argument that there are any policy differences among American presidents, saying, “They are all the same.”
He said, “The Americans claim that if they hadn’t killed 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then World War II wouldn’t have endedÖ. Therefore, the United States served humanity by attacking Japan.” He didn’t say where he got that idea. The most common US argument was that without the atomic bombings, many more people—both Japanese and Americans—would have died in a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands before the war would have ended.
But interspersed with the hateful rhetoric was an entirely different message.
“I insist that the current officials in the negotiations be supported. They need help—and I, too, help them. On the other hand, I insist that they do not retreat one step from the nuclear rights of the nation—the red lines must be observed.”
He said, “We do not intervene in the details of these talks. There are certain red lines and limits. These have to be observed. They [Iran’s negotiators] are instructed to abide by those limits.”
After a long litany recounting the evils of the West and its efforts to gain hegemony over the Middle East, he calmly said: “We want to have friendly relations with all nations—even the United States. We are not hostile to the American people. They are like all other peoples in the world. We have a problem with the American government.”
That message seemed to slip by the Basijis, who then chanted repeatedly: “Death to America,”
In digesting Khamenehi’s anti-American rhetoric, it is useful to recall that when Khamenehi was president in the 1980s, his speeches very rarely even mentioned the United States, let alone were packed with scorching rhetoric about it. But as soon as he became Supreme Leader in 1989, his speeches routinely contained at least a paragraph or two lambasting the West and the United States—just like his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini. Over the decades, the Iran Times has seen only two speeches by Khamenehi that have not contained at least one anti-Western paragraph.