‘Satan’s Confessions’--Iran's Ayatollah Tells Obama to 'Awaken, Correct Your Mistakes'
(CNSNews.com) – Iran’s supreme leader has some new advice for the leader of the country which he calls “the great Satan” – correct the mistakes you are making in the Middle East today, as one of your successors will be sure to confess them in the future.
“You should awaken, correct your mistakes and understand the truth,” is the message to President Obama in a video clip posted online by the Iranian regime this week, and based on an excerpts from an end-of-Ramadan sermon [1] delivered by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on July 18.
Entitled “Satan’s Confessions,” the clip highlights Obama’s comments during an interview last July about predecessors’ policies towards Iran, specifically the U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup [2] that toppled elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and its support for Saddam Hussein during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
(“
f you look at Iranian history, the fact is that we had some involvement with overthrowing a democratically elected regime in Iran,” Obama told [3] New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “We have had in the past supported Saddam Hussein when we know he used chemical weapons in the war between Iran and Iraq …”)
In the English-subtitled video, Khamenei says Obama had admitted to two or three “mistakes,” but had not mentioned “tens of others.”
The video features historical footage of the 1953 takeover, the reign of the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the tenure of Saddam Hussein, and U.S. presidents signing Iran sanctions legislation. One photo purportedly shows a meeting between officials from Israel’s Mossad and the Shah’s intelligence agency, SAVAK.
Also referenced is the accidental 1988 shooting down over the Persian Gulf of an Iranian passenger jet, mistaken by a U.S. warship for a hostile military aircraft.
More recent images depict the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and what the video calls the “post-election unrest sedition in 2009” – when the regime’s harsh crackdown on street protests following the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to dozens of killings and mass arrests.
Against a backdrop of photos of American presidents from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, the ayatollah says:
“I want to give a word of advice to these American statesmen: Today – after the passage of many years you acknowledge that you have made certain mistakes … in the present time too, you are busy making mistakes in different places in the region and particularly towards the Islamic Republic and the people of Iran.”
“In a few years, someone else will turn up and show you your mistakes, just as today you are admitting to the mistakes that your predecessors made,” Khamenei continues. “You are making mistakes as well. Therefore, you should awaken, correct your mistakes and understand the truth. You are making grave mistakes in the region.”
The clip then shows photos of conflict zones in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Bahrain.
It ends with a photo of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria terrorists with blindfolded hostages they are about to execute, and another of Saudi warplanes involved in airstrikes against Shi’ite Houthi rebels in Yemen. Iran has called ISIS a U.S. “creation [4],” and is highly critical [5] of U.S. support for the Saudi campaign in Yemen.
The video was posted online, and promoted on social media, by Khamenei.ir, the domain name of the “Center for Preserving and Publishing the Works of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei.”
Source URL: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/iranian-regimes-new-anti-us-propaganda-message-satans-confessions
