Michael Totten - Iranian Quotes

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The Iranian regime murdered its way into power and tortures and murders to keep itself in power. It doesn't care about human rights any more than Kim Jong-un of North Korea.

Michael Totten
Want a trip into bizarroland? Take a look at the Twitter feed for Iran's 'Supreme Guide' Ayatollah Khamenei. No, his Twitter feed hasn't been hacked by Al Sharpton. Nor is this a spoof site. It's the real online megaphone for the Iranian dictator. This pasty old man doesn't give a flying fork about black people, especially those who live in the United States. When he and his underlings chant 'Death to America', they don't mean death to white America. They're talking about the whole country, from our black president at the top to undocumented immigrants on the bottom and everyone in between.

Michael Totten
Iran probably wouldn't be that aggressively secular if it had a genuinely representative government—unlike Iran, Azerbaijan spent more than a half century under communist rule—but it would almost certainly look like Lebanon or Turkey where there's a healthy balance between the secular and the devout. The Iranian government wouldn't need to send thousands of undercover 'morality police' into the streets in the first place if adherence to strict Islamic codes was what everybody actually wanted.

Michael Totten
Look at a map again. Iran is a powerful state in the middle of the same Eurasia where Putin is building his union. An alliance of some sort with Iran isn't strictly required, but it's certainly helpful. At the very least, Putin wants good relations with the Iranians. And he wants America and American-friendly regimes away from his underbelly for the same reason he wants them off his western flank in Europe, where he fears the West and its economic and military alliances might encroach.

Michael Totten
Iranians, when left alone, are far more liberal-minded and modern than Saudis. The Iranian and Saudi governments, though, are remarkably similar in their fanatical absurdity. The Saudi government has always been more severe, but just at the moment when the Iranian regime is tightening the screws again, Saudi Arabia's own morality police are being stripped of some of their powers.

Michael Totten
A mob set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, stormed the compound and trashed its offices while Iranian security personnel stood aside. This is hardly anything new. The Iranian government has been violently contemptuous of worldwide norms of diplomacy ever since it seized power in 1979. The Iranian hostage crisis, where Islamist revolutionaries held 52 foreign servicemen and women hostage at the American Embassy for 444 days, was just the beginning. Four years later, Iran's terrorist proxies in Lebanon used to a suicide truck bomb to destroy the American embassy in Beirut. Ten years later they blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, also with a suicide truck bomb.

Michael Totten
The Iranian government has been a malignant force since the day it seized power in 1979. It has taken diplomats hostage, destabilized one neighboring state after another—beginning with Lebanon, then moving to Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen—and created terrorist armies that have killed Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and—yes—even Argentines. The Iranian government has done all this without nuclear weapons. The only reason it wasn't able to wreak even more havoc is because it was crippled by sanctions. That's over now.

Michael Totten
And at least the U.S. got something out of the deal. At least our people are still among the living when they come home... Iran committed three criminal acts against American citizens and paid no price. We put kidnappers in prison for a very long time in this country, but the Iranian government was rewarded. What's to stop that government from doing it again? Nothing. Why should the Iranian government stop? Kidnapping and ransoming hostages works. And the regime is already gearing up to do it again.

Michael Totten
Saudi Arabia is the most backward and medieval society in the entire world outside ISIS and Taliban-occupied territory. Tehran is like Amsterdam compared with Riyadh despite the Iranian government's theocratic regulations and draconian enforcers.

Michael Totten
Their absolute monarchy isn't drastically different from the ISIS 'caliphate' in Syria and Iraq except that Riyadh plays well with others diplomatically and pushes back hard against Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis do so for entirely self-interested reasons, of course. They don't care about human rights any more than the Iranians do. They're the world biggest proponents of hard-line Sunni fanaticism. The only reason they're bothered by ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood is because ISIS and the Brotherhood threaten the Saudi royal family's stranglehold on absolute power.

Michael Totten