Iranians protesting their government

Iranians are protesting in the streets against their government. President Trump applauds their courage. Jake Tapper translates, and without his usual negative spin!!

Translated from Persian: To the brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I've stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely, and are inspired by your courage. https://t.co/zCgAIhyZ0c

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 11, 2020

The uprising of the Iranian people

In the Federalist, Erielle Davidson informs us about the people's uprisings in Iran.

As the Iranian regime restores internet connectivity to vast swaths of the country following a government-imposed shutdown, new images are emerging from the week-long blackout that shed light on the severity of the tensions between the Iranian people and their repressive regime.

...“One year into the U.S. unilateral sanctions campaign against Iran – which have been more effective than the past decade of multilateral sanctions – Iranians are pouring out onto the streets and pointing a finger at their own leaders, not Washington, for their shortcomings,” asserts Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

...According to Amnesty International, at least 143 protesters have been killed in confrontations with the regime’s security forces, while reports from U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Human Rights in Iran allege that almost 3,000 others have been arrested. Due to the internet blackout intentionally orchestrated by the Iranian regime to isolate dissidents and prevent the spread of information about the protests, the violent nature of the clashes between protesters and regime security forces is only coming to light now.

As Amnesty reports, “Verified videos show security forces deliberately shooting unarmed protesters from a short distance. In some cases, protesters were shot while they were running away.” Other videos reveal images of security forces shooting at protesters from rooftops. Across the country, tens of gasoline pumps, police stations, and banks have been razed to the ground.

...As Hanin Ghaddar wrote in The Tower back in 2016, “From the very beginning, Iran’s goal has been the establishment of a Shi’ite Arab territory that physically links Iran to southern Lebanon via Iraq and Syria.” But fulfilling this behemoth mission has translated into the Iranian regime allocating funds to, among other things, the development of missile technologies and a burgeoning nuclear program, as well as resulted in the funneling of billions of dollars to various regimes (like Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria) and to terrorist proxies (such as Hezbollah and Hamas).

With Iran’s budget, transparency is a pipe dream, but some have attempted to crunch the numbers. It’s rumored that Assad received roughly $15 billion in aid from the Iranian regime in 2015. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, the terrorist group effectively seeking to run Lebanon, allegedly receives $700 million from Iranian coffers each year.

“Washington’s non-kinetic (peaceful) pressure policy is robbing the regime of revenues, forcing it to choose between ‘guns and butter.’” Taleblu evokes the classic economic model used to explain production choices in a given country when parsing down the regime’s economic preferences. “As [Iran] chooses guns, it risks increasing domestic ire from its own population for its choices.” Indeed, the protests represent the ultimate manifestation of that ire.

...In addition to an effective sanction campaign for identifying and shaming those who violate Iranian human rights, Taleblu also argues that the situation would benefit from the U.S. offering “rhetorical support, quickly and decisively, for when Iranians take to the streets to use every single crisis – social, political, economic – to express their dissatisfaction with the regime.”

Taleblu’s strategies represent a powerful means of supporting freedom-seeking people without immediately resorting to military tactics to do so. They also indicate that the Trump administration has the power to strike an effective deal with a group of individuals, even if informal in some capacities. Unlike the Obama administration, let’s hope it’s with the right ones.

Read more here.

"This president stands with the Iranian people in their quest to get basic freedoms."

The protests in Iran

Lee Smith writes at Tablet Magazine,

...So why aren’t the protests in Iran making headlines?

The short answer is that the American media is incapable of covering the story, because its resources and available story-lines for Iran reporting and expertise were shaped by two powerful official forces—the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Obama White House. Without government minders providing them with story-lines and experts, American reporters are simply lost—and it shows.

...If the people who donned pink pussy hats to resist Donald Trump are one of the year’s big stories, surely people who are shot dead in the streets in Iran for resisting an actual murderous theocracy might also be deserving of a shout-out for their bravery.

...Selling the protesters short is a mistake. For 38 years Iranian crowds have been gathered by regime minders to chant “Death to America, Death to Israel.” When their chant spontaneously changes to “Down with Hezbollah” and “Death to the Dictator” as it has now, something big is happening.

...The (New York) Times, as Tablet colleague James Kirchik reported for Foreign Policy in 2015, runs a travel business that sends Western tourists to Iran. “Travels to Persia,” the Times calls it. If you’re cynical, you probably believe that the Times has an interest in the protests subsiding and the regime surviving—because, after all, anyone can package tours to Paris or Rome.

...The current media landscape was shaped by years of an Obama administration that made the nuclear deal its second-term priority. Talking points on Iran were fed to reporters by the White House—and those who veered outside government-approved lines could expect to be cut off by the administration’s ace press handlers, like active CIA officer Ned Price.

Americans were systematically bombarded by craven regime “talking points” on mainstream and elite media throughout the Obama presidency—because the president had his eye on making a historic deal with Iran that would secure his “legacy.”

...Of course it’s difficult to understand what’s happening in Iran now—the Obama White House and the press sidelined anyone who was not on board with the president’s main political goal. To sell the public on the Iran Deal, the Obama administration promoted hack “reporters” and “experts” who would peddle its fairy-tale story-lines, while setting social media mobs on whoever was brave or stupid or naïve or well-informed enough to cast doubt on its cock-eyed picture of Iran—including independent reporters like David Sanger of the Times, as well as the president’s entire first-term foreign policy cabinet.

The current coverage of the protests sweeping across Iran is bad by design. The Obama administration used the press to mislead the American public in order to win the president’s signature foreign policy initiative. The bill for that program of systematic misinformation is still coming in, and the price is much higher than anyone could have imagined, including more than 500,000 dead in Syria and an American press incapable of understanding, never mind reporting, that this death toll was part of Obama’s quid pro quo for the nuclear deal.

And what was gained? America enriched and strengthened a soon-to-be nuclear regime that murders its neighbors abroad while torturing, oppressing, and impoverishing its own citizens. Whether the current wave of protests is successful or not, they show that the Iranian people are heartily sick of the regime that Obama and his servants spent eight years of his Presidency praising and propping up.

Read more here.

Iranian authorities cut off internet to Iranian citizens.

Ali Noorani and Eric Randolph report in Yahoo that Iranian authorities have cut off internet access to Iranian citizens. Read more here.