Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei says it’s up to the country’s officials on how to decide when this is done in line with the country’s best interests.
Leaders of the country’s enemies are suffering from what he called miscalculation when it comes to Iran, and this must be rectified. The Leader made the remarks in a meeting with the families of those martyred, while protecting the country’s security. He was speaking after the Israeli regime’s military aggression against the Islamic Republic. The leader said the evil act must be neither magnified nor downplayed. Ayatollah Khamenei also slammed Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon and called for a diplomatic, economic and even military coalition against the regime.
Joining us now from the city of Saidia, Morocco is Kevin Barrett for more on the story. Hello, Dr. Barrett. Pleasure to have you. Your initial thoughts on the Iranian leader’s remarks today.
Well, I thought they were characteristically temperate, wise, and firm. The Iranian leadership is playing the role of the adults in the room, while these crazy, psychotic, or rather psychopathic Zionists and the Americans that they control keep behaving so irresponsibly.
It’s also notable that what we’re hearing from the Leader in Iran and the rest of the Axis of Resistance is truthful whereas what we hear from the Zionists is everything but. For instance the the Zionists showed old footage, like an attack on Lebanon, and a fire at an Iranian oil refinery – that was actually shown by the Israeli defense minister as supposedly depicting the Israeli attack on Iran, which it didn’t.
So there’s been all kinds of fake news being spread about this attack, trying to magnify it, when in fact this Israeli attack on Iran was – well, it did kill people. I mean, it was very serious. It needs to be taken seriously and responded to. But it was nothing like what they were claiming they were going to do. Before the attack they were saying “nobody will see it coming.” But they ended up announcing what they were going to do ahead of time and telling us it would be very limited.
And they had said, “Oh, this will be the end of the world for Iran. This will be the biggest attack in the whole history of the region.” And they’d been screaming and yelling about what a terrible, horrible attack they were about to carry out. And then it came as a bit of an anticlimax. And so to try to make it look impressive to their own people, I suppose, they used all of this fake footage and fake news.
So the lies that are just a normal part of standard operating procedure from the Zionist side contrast very markedly with the restraint and the generally hewing to the real world, in other words, telling the truth, coming from the Supreme Leader of Iran and the rest of the Axis of Resistance.
And also, the Leader said, Dr. Barrett, that the country’s enemies are suffering from miscalculation when it comes to Iran, and this must be rectified. What do you perceive to be some of the miscalculations that the Zionist entity in the U.S. harbor when it comes to Iran?
Well, I think miscalculations maybe isn’t even a strong enough word for the fundamental wrongheadedness of the Zionist and American approaches to Iran. The Zionists, of course, have this notion that they can drag the Americans into a big war with Iran, which will somehow play out well for them.
That’s been the overall game plan of Netanyahu for years, since he orchestrated the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 along with other Israelis. They tried to get the U.S. to come into the region and destroy Israel’s enemies. And the last on the list of the seven countries in five years that 9/11 and the 9/11 wars were supposed to target was the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And that didn’t work out. The realists in the U.S. military and the defense community in the United States recognized that an American war with Iran was just not going to work out. And so they have been telling Netanyahu no ever since, but Netanyahu just keeps trying to drag them across that red line.
And so this is a fundamentally flawed approach to Iran and indeed the whole axis of resistance. And it’s based on, I think, hysterical Zionist fantasies. These Zionists are brought up from birth to believe that they are superior to everyone else. The whole world hates them. The whole world wants to gas them in gas chambers. The whole world wants to throw them into the sea. And they’re basically paranoid personalities, and that manifests as psychopathy. And so they imagine that they can’t come to any kind of accommodation with the people in the region where they live today, just like they’ve had problems wherever they’ve lived in the past. And so rather than coming to understandings that would allow them to not only live, but thrive in the region, which they could do if they acted like normal human beings and negotiated and bargained and engaged in good faith, with give and take, under the understanding that we’re all equal here — Instead, with their psychotic chosenness syndrome and persecution complex that these people have been dragging around for 2500 years, they have reacted emotionally and indeed hysterically, imagining that everybody wants to kill them, and so they have to kill everybody else first. That’s the Rise and Kill First doctrine that Ronan Bergman talks about in his book of that name.
So the root of the problem is that these extremely emotional and basically mentally ill Zionists have so much power in the United States, and the people that feel an attachment to the Entity have that kind of power in the United States, that they’ve dragged the world’s biggest empire into a self-destructive conflict that is likely to end with the end of that empire —and certainly will end with the end of the Zionist entity itself.
And before you go, Dr. Barrett, Ayatollah Khamenei also called for a diplomatic, economic, and even military coalition against the Israeli regime. One could even argue a proper diplomatic and economic coalition, if it was actually assembled, wouldn’t even need a military coalition against the regime. Why do you think the region has been so unsuccessful in putting together a united front, a diplomatic and possibly an economic coalition, to ramp up pressure on the regime to thwart its adventurism in the region?
That’s a really good question. And I think part of the answer is the old saying where the mice are plotting to try to deal with the depredations of a cat. And they decide that they can save themselves from the cat by putting a bell on the cat’s collar. But then of course the problem becomes, well, who’s going to bell the cat? Which mouse is going to sneak up on the cat and to put the bell on its collar?
So what’s happening in the region right now, is that the Axis of Resistance, which is the courageous and principled leadership of certain countries and groups, is willing to put themselves in the line of fire. But a lot of the other leaders and countries and groups are afraid to join them because the first one that joins them is going to take a lot of heat. And indeed, that heat can be in the form of assassinations. The Zionists are the world’s leaders in assassinations and all kinds of other dirty tricks, plus all of the economic pressure that the U.S. and its vassals can exert.
So I think there’s fear of being sort of the first. And so the way it would have to happen is that a large number would have to basically join all at once. We would have to have that pressure exerted from Turkey shutting down the Zionist oil. And the Saudi Arabian leadership has been moving towards a better position on this recently, and they would have to join as well. They’ve already made clear that there’s no way they’re going to resume their fake normalization unless this issue gets resolved to the satisfaction of the Palestinians.
But somehow there would need to be a communications process that would allow all of these countries to exert that pressure together at the same time so that no single one of them would be singled out and picked off by the Zionists and their American slaves.
