02/06/12 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, and now Mohammed Saheemi joins us.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC, and he writes for PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau website, as well as antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammed.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me in your program again, Scott.
Well, I appreciate you joining us.
I admit I don't know that many people who know how to read Farsi, I appreciate you being one of them.
And I was notified this morning of some recent war propaganda that's going around.
Apparently, it's a top link at the Matt Drudge website, and it's this World Net Daily article alleging that the supreme leader, the Ayatollah dictator of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has said, kill all Jews, annihilate Israel.
And so I tried to read the Google translations of the so-called original sources here, where these statements originally came from.
But I thought I'd better follow up with you about what you found and the degree of truth that may or may not exist in what I gotta admit, sounds like bogus war propaganda to me, right on the face of it.
Well, first of all, as you said, it is totally bogus and totally nonsense.
What it is, is a blogger in Iran that has no tie to Iranian government, has no official post anywhere, doesn't even have a job, and his name is Alireza Forghani.
He has written a blog in which he has expressed his view that because Israel has attacked Iran and because Israel has occupied Palestinian territory, Muslims, and in particular Iran, should also attack Israel.
This is his personal view.
The article was posted on Aleph, which is a website close to a member of parliament in Iran.
But that website has no link to Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader.
Then the guy who actually propagated it in the English cyberspace, a guy named Reza Khalili, in the website that you also sent me, and I have already seen it, he is basically a charlatan who claims that he used to be a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, and then he defected to the West, and ever since he appeared in the United States, he has been allied with the most extreme, the most warmongering factions that you can find anywhere in the United States.
He, in order to indicate that he's, for example, an important person, he wears masks when he gives a talk, and he is supported, as I said, by the fringe, the most fringe, the most extreme elements here in the United States.
And he's not the first Iranian who does that, because, you know, we have had many Iranians who have left Iran and have arrived here in the United States, and in order to make a living and have some sort of salary and something, they have to lie, they have to spread propaganda, and so on.
So this guy, Reza Khalili, who apparently has spread it from the Farsi version to the English version, is that type of charlatan.
The article itself, when it was posted on Aleph's website, the website itself says that this is purely personal view of the man, the website does not support it, and it is also not the policy of the Iranian government.
So I don't know what all this nonsense and noise and propaganda is all about.
One man in Iran has written, of course, we should condemn it, but this is just his personal view.
We have that type of propaganda among Israelis every day against Iranians.
Remember, for example, in the 1980s, Rafael Itan, who was chief of staff of Israeli Defense Forces, said Arabs and Muslims are cockroaches that should be put in a bottle and the bottle should be closed so that they cannot escape.
We have had all sorts of racist statements by citizens of Israel against Palestinians, against Muslims, against Iranians, but they don't represent, at least officially, they don't represent the official view of the Israeli government, and it's the same case here.
Some guy, somewhere, wrote a blog and said something, and all of a sudden this has become the official view of the Supreme Leader and Iranian government.
That's just nonsense!
Alright, now, let me stop you there for a second, because there's a couple of things to go over already, one of which, what a hoax this guy Reza Khalili's very existence is.
I'd like to get to that in detail, but you point out that this was written at this website, Aleph, which I don't know anything about that, but then Khalili links to the Fars News Agency, where apparently they re-ran it, and this is where he gets in the headline, he's obviously extrapolating in the headline at World Net Daily, that this is the Ayatollah saying this, because it's running in the Ayatollah's paper, even more, I guess, than Press TV.
Fars News is supposed to be representative of what the Ayatollah Khamenei is saying, is that not right?
But, yes, but even if you look at the publication on the Fars website, at the bottom of the article it says, these are purely the author's view, and do not necessarily represent Fars News Agency's views.
Now, in terms of the translation, does he in fact say, because the best I have is Google Translate, which is obviously not quotable or reliable, it's just a droid doing it, but does he in fact say, in the article at the part after he lists the percentage of Jews in the different towns in Israel, and saying that they should be hit in the event of war with Israel, whoever started it, I'm not sure, maybe you can address that too, but does he say kill all the civilians in these towns?
And I have the article in front of myself.
He talks about the fact that Israel's population is about 7,500,000, and then he says that in the northern part of the country, this is the population, in Haifa, that's the part, and then in Central, and then Tel Aviv, and so on and so forth.
And he says that if we want to attack Israel, then these are the population centers, and these are the areas where Iran's Shahab-3 missiles can reach and hit them.
This is what he says.
Then he talks about how if Iran is going to attack Israel, places like railroads and airports and nuclear facilities and so on can also be attacked by Iranian missiles.
That's what he says, yes, in this article.
Well, I'm not sure I heard the part, then.
What are you conceding?
You're conceding that he does say kill all the Jews in Israel?
Oh, no.
In there?
I don't see anything that says.
He quotes Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, that said that Israel is a danger for the Islamic world, and if Israel kills, attacks Muslim countries and kills Muslims, then it is also a duty of Muslims to defend their land and do whatever it takes to do so.
That's what he says, quoting Ayatollah Khomeini.
Is that quote typically meant to justify including up to and including killing civilians?
Is that the point of that quote?
For example, in a totally different context, Osama bin Laden at one point sought and received from some imam in Saudi Arabia permission to kill women and children in defense of his own thing there.
Is that the way that this is generally interpreted?
Is that if Israel attacks Iran, that they're just fighting, killing any number of Israeli civilians in response?
That's not what this says, okay?
And ever since the Iranian Revolution, the Iranian government also has always made it clear that what they support is a unified country in Palestine, in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians live side by side.
The quote that he has from Ayatollah Khomeini does not say that every Jew should be killed.
He says that if the enemy attacks lands of Muslims, this is the precise translation, attacks the land of Muslims, then it is the duty of Muslims to defend their land with whatever that they can, including losing their lives.
And in order to do so, they don't even need the order of their ruler.
That's what the exact translation of the quote from Ayatollah Khomeini.
Okay.
Now, I'm sorry, Mohammad, hold it right there.
I'm going to ask you to hold it right there, because we went over a little bit into the break, and so we're going to have to pick up on the other side of the break with that same quote for the audience that missed it there.
So I'll ask you to hold it right there, and we'll be right back in just a couple minutes.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, talking with Mohammad Sahimi about this war propaganda at WorldNetDaily, saying that the Ayatollah, meaning a website close to the Ayatollah, has said, kill all the Jews, annihilate Israel, which will be a handy replacement for wipe Israel off the map, which everybody knows the president of Iran, who doesn't even have the power to start a war anyway, didn't even say in the first place.
But now, Mohammad, we got cut off by the break while you were translating the specific quote, but now there's actually two specific quotes.
So let me go ahead and lay them out the way that they're laid out in this WorldNetDaily article.
First of all, there's clearly a problem with the quotations here in paragraph number three at WorldNetDaily in this article by Reza Khalili, in that there's an end quote, but there's no open quote for the most heinous of the statements right here in paragraph three, kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel.
There's an end quote at the end, but no beginning quote.
So I'll ask you the part about the jurisprudential justification, quote unquote, in there, I'll ask you to translate that part for us.
And then there's another part later in the article, where they talk about, as we spoke about a little bit earlier, where they talk about the percentages of the Jewish population in these different towns in Israel, where these towns could be hit with Shabab three ballistic missiles, but then the obviously most inflammatory quote here, so called quote here is killing all its inhabitants, its being any one of those cities, I guess, you know, killing all the men, women and children.
The way it read to me was that the author was actually adding that in just the way it was written.
It didn't seem like that was a direct quote, seems like he would want to put direct quotes around it to say something like that, if that's what the whole article is hanging on.
But anyway, so that's the two sections of the statement that somebody who's not the Ayatollah made at this website in Iran, that's got all this attention today.
So if you could please lend us your language skills, sir.
Okay.
First of all, there is no quote from Khamenei, the present Supreme Leader, there are two quotes from Khomeini, who was the leader of revolution.
The first one, which is the third paragraph of the article, talks about what Khomeini talked about when he was alive, namely that most problems that Muslims in the Middle East are suffering from is because of Zionism and Islam and so on.
And Israel is supported by the United States.
And therefore, all the problems that we have is because of Israel and the United States.
And this is well known.
Khomeini said this many, many times.
Then there is a second quote from Khomeini, where he says, if the enemy attacks the land of Muslims and commits aggression, then it is a duty of Muslims to defend their land with whatever tools that they have, including losing their lives.
You see, he says, if the enemy attacks Muslims and commits aggression.
And then from that, the guy who wrote the blog decided that he can, you know, he can reach the conclusion that Iran should attack Israel.
But even he says that because Israel wants to attack Iran in order to prevent an attack by Israel on Iran, Iran can preempt Israel and attack Israel first.
The type of, for example, preemption that George W. Bush had against Saddam Hussein when he claimed that if you don't attack him, he's going to attack us.
So that's what he said.
And then he said, OK, if you are going to attack Israel, where is it that we should attack?
And then he talks about the population centers, the industrial center, the nuclear facility of Israel, and so on and so forth.
That's what he says throughout the article.
So I don't know whether this is clear enough or I need to explain more.
That's what the essence of the article is.
Tell us some more, if you could, please, about Reza Khalili.
Yeah, Reza Khalili, as I said, Reza Khalili is basically an Iranian charlatan that has come to the United States and claims that he was a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, but he decided to separate his way from the Revolutionary Guards and left Iran in 1989.
Now, note that 1989 is, first of all, 23 years ago.
And secondly, even if he was a member of the Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, which I highly doubt, the Revolutionary Guards of that era, which was during the Iran-Iraq War, and the Revolutionary Guards of this era are totally different.
So he has no insight or knowledge about what's going on within the Revolutionary Guards.
But he has presented himself as somebody who is very knowledgeable about what's going on inside Iran.
But more importantly, ever since he arrived in the United States, he has been supported, as I said in the previous part of the program, by the most fringe, the most extreme elements within what we call at Antiwar.com the wall party.
In other words, these guys look for anybody who may sound Persian and who may be from Iran in order to give credibility for their advocacy of war against Iran.
And Reza Khalili is one of those.
He has no credibility within the Iranian community in the United States.
He has no importance within the Iranian community within the United States.
And even within the Iranian community, we have people who support, for example, sanctions against Iran.
But even within that segment of the Iranian community in the United States, Reza Khalili has no credibility, simply because everybody knows that, first of all, he's charlatan, he lies, he exaggerates, and he's also supported by the most fringe elements of the war party in the United States that every Iranian in the United States is ashamed of to admit that, you know, to have any association with those fringe elements.
Well, when it comes to the neoconservatives, Mohamed, it looks to me like he's no Ahmed Chalabi.
He's more like a curveball when it comes to, you know, he doesn't even get to pal around with the higher level AEI guys.
He's more on the Frank Gaffney Center for Security Policy, Newt Gingrich, lunatic kind of level.
Oh, he is.
I mean, I would say he's even worse than Kerbal.
Of course, he's not an Ahmed Chalabi, because Chalabi was smart enough to play the United States against Iran, and it turned out that not only he had lied, but he was a double agent.
But this guy is not even that smart.
He is worse than Kerbal, because the type of things that he says, given that Iran, despite Iranian regime repression against people, is still relatively open.
So he says things about the Iranian regime and what is going on within Iran that is so far-fetched, so separated from reality, that, as I said, he has no credibility whatsoever within the Iranian community.
If you look at, for example, Iranian community in Southern California, there are many satellite television stations here that constantly are involved in propaganda against Iranian government and how Iran nuclear program is going to develop a nuclear weapon, and so on.
But even these satellite televisions have never, ever interviewed this guy, have never had this guy talking to them, because he has no credibility whatsoever.
So it is totally amazing to me that this guy says something, represents the article in a totally wrong and exaggerated way, and then people pick up on what he says and present it as a fact.
I mean, this is just totally amazing, and at the same time, totally frightening how the public can easily be fooled by this type of propaganda.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing, is they love to be fooled by it.
It's fun to be fooled by it.
I get it.
Yeah.
But yeah, you know, I mean, this is a guy where it was just a couple of months back, Jason Ditz and I had a lot of fun with his piece for The Washington Times, where he declares that Iran has nukes already.
They have for years, which you would think would negate all the things he said about how they're making nukes this whole time, and especially in these last couple of weeks, when we even have the head of Mossad coming out and saying, no, they haven't even made the decision to begin to start making nukes, and we don't know when or if they will.
Jeff Clapper said last week, the director of national intelligence, that Iran is not making nuclear weapons, and they haven't made any decision to make nuclear weapons.
And as you said, Reza Khalili said in Washington Times, that they already have nuclear weapons.
That goes to show how credible the guy is, and what a charlatan and liar and exaggerator Reza Khalili is.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the fact that he's got this published at WorldNetDaily and not in The Washington Times might tell us something.
But, you know, the way it works, Mohammed, and it's a real bummer, too.
It's my medium.
It's talk radio.
And the right wing echo chamber is how this kind of stuff gets around.
And there really is at this point, a completely alternate reality going on, where pretty much anything about Muslims anywhere in the world, here or abroad, can be believed and can be put out by the likes of WorldNetDaily and Frank Gaffney and their associates and worse.
And it just seems believable because they never get a chance to tune into you and they just never hear otherwise.
And all sides agree.
And so the facts be damned.
And stories like this really have a lot of legs a lot of times.
As you said, this will be cited repeatedly by others in the future.
At least we do what we can.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, as always, Mohammed.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott, for having me on your program.
Bye.
That's Mohammed Sahimi, everybody, Professor at USC and writer for Frontline, PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau, and also antiwar.com.
See you tomorrow.