Tehran Whips up Crisis Frenzy - at Home too

DEBKAfile:

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoed by the ayatollahs, persists in making outrageous hate statements, directed mainly at Israel.

His latest called the Holocaust a myth and proposed the Jews be resettled in Europe or Alaska - two months after he was condemned worldwide for saying Israel should be wiped off the map. These statements aggravate tensions in the West – especially around Iran’s nuclear intentions. But the stream of hate continues to issue from Tehran in the face of the European summit’s threat of UN sanctions Friday, Dec. 16, for its president’s “unacceptable” statements and the West’s growing impatience with diplomacy for halting Iran’s advance towards a nuclear weapon. US secretary of state Condoleezza said she sees “no evidence that Iran is interested in a deal that is going to be acceptable to an international community that is extremely skeptical of what the Iranians are up to.”

At home too, Iran’s rulers are bent on generating a sense of high crisis and menace. Their methods were described exclusively in DEBKA-Net-Weekly 233 on Dec. 9.

A sort of collective delusional hysteria is sweeping the Iranian populace, induced by the Islamic republic’s extremist clerical rulers for reasons of their own. Wonder and hate are invoked by fake miracles and myths, demons and monsters.

The president seems bent on portraying himself as a charmed figure. READ MORE

On a visit to one of the elite ten grand ayatollahs of the regime, Javadi-Amoli, in Qom this week, Ahmadinejad came out with this rigmarole:

“When I addressed the UN General Assembly, a dazzling aura formed around my head. This I learned from one of the heads of state listening to my speech. He told me that they were all sitting at the edge of their seats to drink in the message from our Islamic regime.

That was in September. In mid-October, Ahmadinejad suddenly ordered a well in northern Iraq to be declared the sacred gate to the tunnel leading to the Shiite Messiah – Mahdi in Arabic, Emam-e Zaman in Farsi. The faithful were encouraged to toss notes into the pit bearing their secret wishes, and a set of lavish mosques, hotels and restaurants ordered built around the magic shrine to accommodate hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The Islamic regime in Tehran was declared the guardian of this holy place.

To further charge the atmosphere, a miraculous dog was fabricated to star in a pious film circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies in Tehran. The dog was shown bowing at the tomb of the eighth Shiite Imam Reza in the northeastern town of Mashad, before climbing atop the marble edifice and bursting into canine tears. The episode caused great excitement and was widely covered in Iran’s media - until a coolheaded cleric reminded the dog-worshippers that Islam regards dogs as unclean creatures. The episode was then exposed as a fraud concocted by a film director who had trained his dog for the part.

Amid these absurd episodes, ayatollahs at the head of government have begun spouting the grossest form of hate rhetoric heard even in Tehran to demonize all of Iran’s opponents and Western infidels in particular.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chairman of the Council for Preserving the Constitution, declared that only Shiites were human beings and the rest of the world’s inhabitants were corrupt animals fit only to be destroyed. Non-Muslims, he said, were evil monsters which defiled the planet earth.

These words aroused anger even in Iran, especially among minorities. The Zoroastrian leader demanded an immediate retraction and apology. However there was more to come. The director of Friday sermons in Qom, Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, last Friday described the United States and Britain as cancerous growths that destroy any country they penetrate and must be rooted out.

(This Friday, Dec. 16, the same Meshkini said Ahmadinejad’s comment denying the Holocaust is completely logical and what all Iranians think. He was addressing Friday worshippers at the Qom religious center. Meshkeni is the powerful chairman of the Assembly of Experts which oversees supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.)

Ayatollah Mohamad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the president’s religious mentor, told his congregation: “Shiites must avoid contact with their enemies, even if they are on the point of death. Never ask a non-Shiite for bread.”

No doubt impressed by Michael Jackson’s song in praise of Islam, Yazdi produced a grandiose plan for dispatching 5,000 missionaries to the United States to spread the true faith. It goes without saying that each of these “missionaries” would form a center for recruiting and training “martyrs” for killing infidels.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Iran experts recall that in the 1980s, the founder of the Islamic republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini resorted extensively to pious and religious symbolism to invoke a sense of menace and electric anticipation in the country. His purpose was to galvanize young men to sacrifice themselves as martyrs in Iran’s holy wars and export of its revolution. Plastic keys to heaven, mass-produced cheaply in the Far East, were handed out to each soldier. Troops fighting in the Iraq-Iran war were entertained by misty visions of the glorious Messiah prancing on his white horse to the front.

The atmosphere of hysteria and dread drummed up in Iran today may be the ayatollahs’ proven way of preparing the country for some new sacrifice.