Iran International
Iranian hardliners demand the prosecution of a pro-reform politician for defending the terrorist designation of the Revolutionary Guard by the United States.
Lawmaker Mansour Haghighatpour said on Tuesday that Faezeh Hashemi has crossed the Islamic Republic's "red lines" and "trampled on the country's values and national interests. So much leniency emboldens people like her. I believe that the Islamic Republic must take appropriate punitive action against Faezeh Hashemi and discipline her," he said.
Hashemi is the daughter of former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and a member of the Central Council of the pro-reform Kargozaran-e Sazandegi (Executives of Construction) Party.
Fars news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard on Tuesday called Hashemi a "foot soldier" of the United States while another IRGC-affiliated media outlet, Javan newspaper dubbed her "flagrant" and criticized her party and the Rafsanjani clan for not officially renouncing her.
Hashemi had said during a discussion on the social media app Clubhouse on April 16 that removing the IRGC from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) was not in Iran's interest.
Hashemi had argued it is possible that certain factions in the IRGC may be intentionally taking actions to keep the whole entity on the US terrorist list. She cited IRGC's missile attack on Iraq's Kurdish regional capital of Erbil in March and criticized the Guards for boasting about the attack instead of keeping a profile as the country’s defender, posing no threat to others in the region.
She also said the IRGC is constantly broadening both the sphere and scope of its activities in Iran’s economy and politics, making it even harder to stick to its military role. “The only way for the IRGC to return to the barracks is to keep them on the [FTO] sanctions list,” she said.
This is not the first time in recent years that Hashemi has ventured into criticizing the Iranian regime’s core values or positions, espoused by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his hardliner supporters. In January, she said the Islamic Republic was responsible in the killing half a million Syrians with its military intervention in the Syrian civil war.
Hardliner social media users have accused Hashemi of being a traitor to the country, while others including some anti-regime activists have said that her criticism of the regime could only be acceptable when she also admits her father's role in engineering the selection of Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader in 1989, and later allowing the IRGC to assume an economic role.
Abdolreza Davari, one of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's advisors and confidants said Hashemi was wrong to say the IRGC should not be delisted and considered her remarks "against national security" but defended her right to freedom of expression. "Why should she and her late father be subjected to so many threats, accusations, and abuse instead of her remarks being logically criticized?" Davari tweeted.
Faezeh Hashemi is perhaps the most controversial of Hashemi-Rafsanjani's five children and often targeted by hardliners for her candid criticism of the regime, compulsory hijab, and prosecution of followers of the banned Baha'i faith. She is also the former president of Women's Sports Federation and editor-in-chief of banned reformist Zan newspaper.
Hashemi has been prosecuted for her activities on several occasions and served two six-month prison sentences for "propaganda against the state" and similar charges in 2012 and 2017.
According To Jahan-e Sanaat newspaper in Tehran, disagreements between parliament (Majles) and President Ebrahim Raisi are mainly in four areas: A controversial petrochemical plant, a bill to restrict internet access, discontinuing cheap dollars for essential imports and the motions planned by a sizeable group of lawmakers to unseat Raisi's economic ministers.
The petrochemical plant, that is still being built despite strong opposition by Raisi and his Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, is a project that has faced strong opposition by locals and environmentalists. The location in northern Iran by the Caspian Sea is near a natural reserve which is ecologically vulnerable, and the area is too densely populated for a project whose first outcome for the region will be pollution.
Widespread opposition to the project has reached a sensitive point as media has revealed that the man behind the project is allegedly a corrupt individual who has borrowed money from state banks under two different identities and has refused to pay back a $50-million loan after many years.
The only top official who has supported the project in public is Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf who is now quietly at loggerheads with Raisi over the issue.
The second area of disagreement is a bill to restrict internet access which particularly targets foreign social media platforms. The bill is ironically called "The Protection Bill" as its advocates claim that is meant to protect users from the perils of social media.
Raisi opposes the bill mainly because he knows that there are 1.7 million small businesses active on Instagram that provide jobs to around nine million Iranians. Banning access to social media will add those nine million to millions of other hungry bellies Raisi has to feed.
Some have said that Raisi also knows the country still lacks the infrastructure to replace the Internet with a local intranet network. So, he fears that the state’s administrative, financial and health systems as well as many public services might collapse and create even more problems for a government that already faces a host of hard issues.
The third disagreement between the Majles and the administration is the preferential rate of 42,000 rials per US dollar allocated for importing essential food and medicine. Lawmakers, who have come on board claiming to be revolutionaries, believe this is the only area they can have an impact by cutting a major source of potential corruption by individuals who have misused the cheap dollars to make profits in businesses that have nothing to do with essential imports.
Here too, Raisi knows that cutting off the subsidy will further increase the cost of living and will land his administration in trouble by creating the risk of street protests.
Finally, is the motion planned by over 50 of parliament's lawmakers to impeach Raisi's economic ministers including Industry Minister Reza Fatemi Amin and Labor Minister Hojjat Abdolmaleki who are believed to be his most vulnerable aides. Political circles in Tehran seem to be quite certain that the industry minister will be leaving the administration during the coming weeks.
These are only the main outstanding problems between the Majles and Raisi. Other problems such as the claim by some lawmakers that the administration has kept them in the dark about the nuclear negotiations also make matters worse, if lawmakers conclude that Raisi is in a weak position.
"If you make slightest move against our nation ... our armed forces destination will be the heart of the Zionist regime," Raisi said in a televised speech from the Army Day parade in Tehran.
Raisi also referred to ever-closer cooperation between Israel and Arab states that have normalized relations with the Jewish state.
“Our message to the Zionists is that if you pursue normalization with regional countries, you must know that your smallest action is not hidden from our armed forces and intelligence bodies…,” he said.
The establishment of full relations between the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Persian Gulf Arab states with Israel in 2020 was a significant setback for the Islamic Republic that has campaigned tirelessly in isolating what it calls “the Zionist enemy”.
Tehran’s nuclear program and support for militant groups in the region is what hastened the establishment of ties between Arab states and Israel, which have begun to cooperate on military and intelligence areas.
In February, Israeli defense chief Benny Gantz visited the small Persian Gulf country of Bahrain to expand cooperation, after Iran-backed Yemeni Houthis attacked UAE with missiles and drones in January.
In March, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Morocco held a summit in Israel, in what was a historic development in the Middle East.
Raisi compared the Islamic Republic’s adversaries to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who attacked Iran in 1980, a year after the establishment of the new revolutionary regime. Eight years of war followed with neither side winning. Saddam was eventually overthrown by a US invasion in 2003 and hanged by a new government.
Raisi said Iran’s enemies should look at what happened to the Iraqi leader and draw their own lessons.
He also drew attention to Biden administration statements that the US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions against the Islamic Republic have failed. Iranian officials have been using this line of attack against the United States, after the State Department on January 25 criticized former president Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement known as JCPOA, and the imposition of sanctions on Iran.
“Today, the State Department spokesman announces in front of the whole world that we [the US] are disgracefully defeated in sanctioning and [exerting] maximum pressure on Iran, and this is the fate of those who want to confront the Islamic system,” Raisi said.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had also used this argument, saying the US was defeated and has to agree with Iran’s terms in a new nuclear deal.
Nuclear negotiations that began in April 2021 have stalled as Tehran has demanded the removal of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).
Top Iranian officials while insisting on their “red lines” in the talks, are trying to put up a brave face, insisting that that they have been able to circumvent US sanctions by exporting more oil and repatriating the funds. The Biden administration apparently relaxed the enforcement of sanctions in 2021 as it was trying to reach a new agreement with Tehran to restore the JCPOA.