Behind the Headlines/August 6

Jamshid Chalangi:

In tonight’s program of Behind the Headlines:

The latest news of Iran, including:

Will the Islamic republic regime survive this latest round of socio-economic crisis?

What are the roots of the regime’s animosity with the human rights of the Iranian people?

And why this regime cannot reform itself?

Our guests to discuss these topics tonight are Khosrow Forouhar and Massoud Moayedi.

Jamshid Chalangi:

The anti-regime protests have now spread to many Iranian cities and towns and the regime looks most shaky than anytime before. It appears that at least in the matter of economy it has nothing to offer.

Khosrow Forouhar:

Rouhani’s threat of blocking the Strait of Hormuz was made on the same day as the anniversary of the defeat of Iran’s navy when a US warship torpedoed an Iranian frigate in the Persian Gulf.

Now some commanders of the Revolutionary Guard have joined Rouhani in his rhetoric and parrot his words about this issue.

Sadly, we live in a country where slogans rule, instead of statesmanship and rationale. Some reformists claim that the US pressure is to be blamed for the current economic problems of Iran.

However, if the Iranian people took part in the 1979 revolution for ideological reasons, this time they are very mature and would not follow any ideological leadership or burn any country’s flag and in essence they have rejected a religious establishment to rule over them.

Massoud Moayedi:

The fact of the matter is that the Iranian people have abandoned both reformist and conservative factions of the regime and do not trust either of them. The reformists have repeatedly lied to the people and abused them only to stay as part of the establishment.

The interesting thing is that most of the current protests are taking place at nights, which means the same jobless people who are looking for daily jobs during the daytime are demonstrating later in the night.

Khosrow Forouhar:

I believe the Iranians are suffering from an historical moral and political degeneration that goes back to the medieval time. While the Western world was going through the enlightenment, Shah Ismail of the Safavid dynasty started to import reactionary mullahs from the Lebanon to Iran to promote Shia ideology and at the same time jailed all progressive thinkers and artists and writers who opposed his tyrannical rule.

And his successors like Shah Sultan Hossein Safavid and the Shia mullahs around his court surrendered to an Afghan invasion later and fled Iran in humiliation.This story of the Shia religious leaders backstabbing our nation and its interests have continued ever since in our contemporary history and today we have a regime that does not have any feeling for Iran and the Iranian people and as such does not care about the calamities that it has brought onto thecountry.

Massoud Moayedi:

All ideological regimes behave like what the Islamic republic does. In reality they do not even believe in their Islam. All they are interested in is to stay in power and fill their pockets with the nation’s wealth.

And the result is that in the second largest oil and gas exporter country of the world, our children use a filthy and stinking abandoned stable as a “school”!