Barack Obama has finally found the common ground he has been searching for with the Iranian regime. They share support for the Occupy Wall Street protest, whose premise is to pit the “virtuous” oppressed 99% of Americans against the top 1% of “wealthy, greedy” Americans.
Last week, Obama said that the protest “expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.” The protesters, he claimed, “are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works…and that’s going to express itself politically in 2012 and beyond.” Obama had previously told Americans on national television that their country is a nation “with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was so enthusiastic about the Occupy Wall Street protesters that she came as close to offering a prayer as she probably ever has in her lifetime. “God bless them,” Pelosi said.
Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, who considers himself to be the earthly deputy of both Prophet Muhammad and the hidden 12th Imam, must have heard Pelosi’s invocation. He came out in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest this week. He said that it shows how the capitalist system in the U.S. and the West has reached a dead end. When people use the slogan “we are the 99 percent,” Khamenei declared, the remaining one percent is “condemned.”
Obama and Khamenei would have been able to share their support for Occupy Wall Street as an ice breaker if they ever got together for those unconditional negotiations with Iran that Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. Sure, Obama would have had to endure a repetition of Khamenei’s charge this week that the demonstrators were being harshly treated by U.S. officials. Prophet Muhammad’s self-declared earthly deputy said with a straight face that such treatment is not seen even in underdeveloped countries with dictatorial regimes. No doubt, to keep the peace, Obama would have bowed to the Supreme Leader and apologized, while continuing his own failure to respond forcefully regarding the brutal crack-down by Khamenei’s security forces against peaceful Iranian dissidents in June 2009.
Too bad that the Iranian regime’s attempted assassination on American soil of the Saudi ambassador to the United States and its plot to blow up two embassies in Washington, D.C. intruded and will probably end the chance for such a meeting any time soon. The Obama administration is finally getting upset with the Iranian regime – something that Iran’s march towards a nuclear arms capability, its announced intention to send its warships off the coast of the United States, its infiltration of terrorists into Latin America and its plans to build a missile base in Venezuela, have not aroused. But whileSecretary of State Hillary Clinton is calling up world leaders to rally expressions of international outrage against Iran, the Iranian government is using the Occupy Wall Street protests to shift blame for the episode to the United States.
Iranian government officials complained that the Obama administration was fabricating the alleged plot to divert attention from the Occupy Wall Street protests. In an interview with the Iranian news agency Fars, transcribed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Majlis Supreme National Security Committee chairman Ala Al-Din Boroujerdi said, “Without a doubt, this new American-Zionist plot was aimed at diverting public attention from the crisis in which [President] Obama has become entangled – [that is,] the Wall Street popular uprising.”
Apparently, Boroujerdi missed Obama’s statement last week giving his presidential seal of approval to the protests as an expression of “the frustrations that the American people feel.”
As usual, Obama is out of touch with the feelings of most Americans. The protests express the frustrations of the far Left, his own base. The core includes significant contingents who hate capitalism and think they are bringing the Arab Spring to America. They are much closer to Khamenei’s way of thinking than they are to ordinary Americans’.
“One problem is that the corruption of capitalism has become clear to the people. Of course this movement might be suppressed, but they cannot destroy the roots of the movement,” Khamenei said.
Khamenei claimed the protests proved that U.S. capitalism was on the “verge of full collapse.” He predicted that the movement “will grow so that it will bring down the capitalist system and the west.”
General Masoud Jazayeri of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, whose Qods Force unit was allegedly involved in the aborted ambassador assassination and embassy bombing plot, said the protests were “a revolution and a comprehensive movement against corruption…in the making. The last phase will be the collapse of the Western capitalist system.”
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