NCRI RAMADAN RECEPTION

LONDON, 28^th APRIL 2022

IRAN’S PRESIDENT IS A FARCICAL LATTER-DAY ‘KING CANUTE’

It is a great pleasure to address you this evening at this Ramadan reception. I’m only sorry that I could not be with you in person. But it is perhaps thought provoking that during Ramadan, as Iran’s ruling theocratic elite stumble from crisis to crisis, starving men, women and children are raking through trash cans searching for food scraps. Adverts are appearing from people willing to sell their kidneys or corneas for cash. 

After decades of corruption, incompetence and warmongering, Iran’s descent into economic chaos can be traced directly to the ruling clerical regime and their tyrannical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The regime likes to place the blame on tough economic sanctions imposed by former president Donald Trump under his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. But their policy of aggressive military expansionism across the Middle East has seen them consistently pour men and resources into backing Bashar al-Assad and his murderous civil war in Syria, while they have simultaneously driven the genocidal campaign against the Sunni population of neighbouring Iraq through their support for the brutal Shi’ia popular mobilization forces (PMF). They have openly financed and supplied the Houthi rebels in Yemen and continue to provide vast funding for the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. They have also routinely stolen the Iranian people’s wealth to finance their clandestine and illegal race to build a nuclear weapon.

Combined with the mullah’s predilection for corruptly lining their own pockets, it is little surprise that the country with the world’s second largest gas reserves and fourth largest crude oil reserves is now facing economic meltdown. Iran, despite its once rich, civilized and open culture, has now become an international pariah, its religious fascist regime condemned for human rights violations, genocide and the export of terror, while its 80 million beleaguered citizens, over half of whom are under forty, struggle to feed their families against a background of record summer temperatures, power outages, water shortages and food prices that have spiralled by more than 40%. 

The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his key role in the 1988 massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners, mostly young members or supporters of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/ Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), has achieved a new career highpoint, as a stand-up comedian. Last week he ordered the eradication of poverty and an end to rising prices in two weeks! In a meeting with his cabinet, Raisi made the astonishing claim that inflation, running at over 40% per year, had “disappeared!” The ill-educated and criminal president appears to have borrowed a page from the playbook of the ancient Viking King Canute, who in the tenth century, famously tried unsuccessfully to order the incoming tide to stop. As Iran struggles through its fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of Iranians stand in long lines to purchase chickens at prices set by the government. The mullahs have even absurdly created a so-called “Poultry and egg market organizing committee,” as people face poultry shortages and skyrocketing prices. They will no doubt be greatly relieved to hear that their own King Canute has ordered an end to rising prices, poverty and inflation!

Raisi has become a laughingstock in Iran for his endless boasts and promises to rebuild the economy, which are routinely parroted by his deferential ministers. Khamenei engineered the sham election of Raisi and his cabinet of former IRGC thugs and gangsters, to shore up his crumbling grasp on power. It has backfired spectacularly. Raisi’s knee-jerk solution to every crisis has been to increase oppression, increase arrests, increase executions and display naked hostility to the international community. 

As Iran’s economic downfall races towards a cliff-edge, Raisi and his lieutenants cover up their disastrous policies, such as printing banknotes, embezzlement and incompetence, by lies, distortions and meaningless promises. Even if it rained gold coins, the regime’s economy could not be saved. Signs of growing unrest and open support for the courageous resistance units of the PMOI/MEK are now commonplace in every town and city in Iran. 80 million Iranians have had enough. Their hatred of the mullahs and the oppressive forces of the IRGC are manifest. With almost half of the Iranian population now living below the international poverty line, the people feel that they have nothing more to lose. A massive eruption of volcanic proportions is coming, which will sweep Khamenei, Raisi and their whole entourage from power. 

King Canute demonstrated how even an all-powerful Ruler cannot stop the incoming tide. Khamenei and Raisi are about to learn the same lesson.