Joel Rosenberg Updates Iran And The New President Rouhani

Hassan Rouhani was formally installed as Iran’s 7th president on Saturday. He began his four-year term with the full endorsement of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s so-called “Supreme Leader,” amidst calls by top Iranian and Shia leaders to destroy the State of Israel.

Khamenei praised the “selection of a worthy individual who has more than three decades of service to the system of the Islamic Republic…and who from the time of the revolutionary struggle…has resisted the enemies of the Islamic Revolution,” Reuters reported.

Outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left office predicting the complete destruction of Israel was increasingly close at hand.  “I swear to God that a ferocious storm is coming and it will uproot the Zionist entity,” Ahmadinejad declared on Friday, which was “Quds Day,” the day Muslims mark each year in opposition to Israel and the Jewish people controlling Jerusalem and vowing to reclaim Jerusalem and all of “Palestine” for Islam.

Also speaking on Friday, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah — a key agent of Iran — also called for the destruction of Israel. “The elimination of Israel is not only a Palestinian interest,” said Nasrallah. “It is the interest of the entire Muslim world and the entire Arab world.” The Hezbollah leader also said Israel is a “cancer” in the region and declared that “the only solution is to destroy it without giving it the opportunity to surrender.”

Much of the Western press is describing Rouhani today as a “moderate.” But as I have noted in the past, nothing could be further from the truth. 

Rouhani is no moderate. He is a disciple of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late fanatical tyrant of Tehran. He was a senior national security advisor to Khomeini during the brutal war with Iraq that left a million people dead. He served as a top national security advisor to the regime in the 1990s, as well. He was Iran’s nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005 and is both a loyal defender of Iran’s nuclear program and a shrewd and experienced diplomat.

Consider the following:

1. Rouhani’s son committed suicide, “ashamed” of father’s Radicalism.
2. Rouhani was endorsed by the only Iranian leader ever to publicly call for Israel to be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
3. Rouhani has ruled out any halt to uranium enrichment program
4. Rouhani ”chaired Iran’s National Security Council between 1989 and 2005, meaning he was at the top table when Iran masterminded the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people, and of the Khobar Towers in 1996, killing 19 U.S. airmen,” noted a column in the Wall Street Journal. Rouhani “would also have been intimately familiar with the secret construction of Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities in Arak, Natanz and Isfahan, which weren’t publicly exposed until 2002. Rouhani also called on the regime’s basij militia to suppress the student protests of July 1999 ‘mercilessly and monumentally.’ More than a dozen students were killed in those protests, more than 1,000 were arrested, hundreds were tortured, and 70 simply ‘disappeared.’”
5. Rohani once approved of hiding Iran atomic work – “Years before he became Iran’s president-elect, Hassan Rohani spoke approvingly about concealing his nation’s nuclear program and said that when Pakistan got atomic bombs and Brazil began enriching uranium, ‘the world started to work with them,’” reported Reuters. “The comments offer an intriguing window into the past thinking of Rohani, widely seen as a moderate or pragmatic conservative, whose surprise victory in weekend elections to succeed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was perceived by the United States and other Western powers as positive — at least at first glance.”
6. Rouhani thanked the Mahdi, also known as the Twelfth Imam — the Shia Islamic so-called messiah — for his presidential victory.
7. Rouhani is such a close ally of current Supreme Leader Khamenei, who remains hell-bent on building nuclear weapons, that the Netanyahu government is increasingly of the mind that it may have to take military action to stop Iran from getting The Bomb, and soon.