March 15, 2019
The US government is an evil institution and was evil long before anyone ever heard of Donald Trump, according to the state news agency of the Islamic Republic.
“There is almost no class of crimes the US government has not committed,” writes Hossein Abolqasemi. A staff member of the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) English service in a commentary he wrote last month.
The commentary is entitled, “Down with the US: A brief history of crimes.”
He writes, “In my capacity as a journalist and as an Iranian, I have the right and the duty to describe, for those who are not apprised of the reasons, why the US is so hated by many in Iran, in Western Asia and in some other parts of the world, so that it may sink in.”
He summarizes that the US government uses its leverage “to hurt others. It has repeatedly hurt the world, regions, and even individuals and has committed innumerable crimes that can be seen and proved with a small search in history.”
He then begins his laundry list of American crimes. “It is common knowledge that the US destroyed two Japanese cities with atomic bombs and Vietnam with an invasion.
“According to the confessions of the US authorities, they have created and supported the Daesh (ISIS) and Taliban terrorist groups that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and amputations in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.” The US, of course, has not said anything of the sort.
“Speaking to thousands of supporters at a Broward County arena in August 2016, US President Donald Trump said during his presidential campaign, ‘ISIS is honoring President Obama…. He is the founder of ISIS. He is the founder of ISIS, OK? He is the founder. He founded ISIS. And I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.” This was one of Trump’s favorite political lines in his campaign, but that hardly makes it true. In fact, it is just about the only thing that Donald Trump has said that the Iranian establishment treats as truth.
“The US also was in control of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison that needs no more description,” he writes, without noting that 11 US Army personnel, most from a single unit, were convicted of crimes at Abu Gharib while the Islamic Republic has not convicted anyone in 40 years of committing torture in an Iranian prison.
“In the recent weeks, US government stood by Saudi Arabia that had slaughtered Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist of Wall Street Journal, and is still supporting the incessant crimes committed by the House of Saud in Yemen War,” he wrote. The House of Representatives has now voted to cut off US involvement in Yemen.
Many of the charges leveled by Abolqasemi are accurate, like US responsibility for the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
But more often, Abolqasemi does not merely exaggerate, but invents charges.
“Another measure taken by the US,” he writes, “was its green light to Saddam, the dictator of Iraq, to invade Iran.” In truth, Washington was as surprised by the invasion as Tehran. What is true is that Washington didn’t go to any great effort to try to halt the invasion after it began—largely because Iran was holding 52 Americans as hostages at the time.
Abolqasemi goes on to charge: “The US crimes against the Iranian people included civilians as well. They supported the MKO terrorist group that has reportedly assassinated 17,000 Iranian people, and also, on 3 July 1988, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a scheduled passenger flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai.”
He doesn’t mention that the US listed the Mojahedin-e Khalq as a terrorist organization from the 1980s until a court judge forced the group’s delisting in 2012 when the State Department could not come up with any terrorist acts committed after 1999. As for the Airbus shootdown, he ignores the investigative report showing all the blunders by the ship’s crew that led to the decision to fire two missiles at the plane that had been erroneously identified as a combat jet descending to attack the ship.
“In the recent years,” he writes, “the US made up and supported street protests in Iran, supported terrorist groups, especially the ones based near the Iranian borders, and assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists.” The last is an interesting allegation considering that the Islamic Republic itself blames Israel for those assassinations and tried to take revenge on Israel.
After this and many citations in his article, Abolqasemi concludes: “As you see, there is almost no class of crimes the US government has not committed. Now, I guess not only do the readers, even American citizens, know why many Iranians detest the US government and shout ‘Down with the US’, but they also feel the urge to chant the same slogan with all the freedom-seekers of the world.”
