Iran Calls UNGA Resolution On Rights Violations ‘Hypocritical’

At the same time, tens of Friday prayer Imams as well as some other hardliner clerics supported the executions and demanded longer prison sentences for protesters. One Imam, firebrand Ahmad Khatami in Tehran said that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “speaks for God Almighty” and that his orders should be obeyed as sacred words.

Khatami added that confronting Khamenei is tantamount to standing against God and his saints and prophets.

Elsewhere in Iran, another cleric, a member of the Assembly of Experts, Abbas Ka'bi supported the protesters' execution and said at the Qom Seminary that protesters disrupt public security and thus they fight God and should be executed.

Many Iranian clerics as well as Muslim scholars in Iran and other countries have objected to the execution of protesters on religious grounds of punishing those “who fight God.”

Meanwhile, another hardliner, Ahmad Alamolhoda, who represents Khamenei in Khorasan Province in northeast Iran said on Friday that those who chant, "Woman, Life, Freedom" are godless. He also described those who are against compulsory hijab in Iran as "mercenaries."

Alamolhoda, who is the father-in-law of President Ebrahim Raisi, further claimed that God belongs to the Islamic Republic and that there is no God for the enemies of the clerical regime in Iran.

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Confronting the extremist clerics, Ayatollah Mostafa Mohaqeq Damad, the Chairman of the Islamic Studies group at the Iran Academy of Sciences has criticized the hardliners who call for maximum punishment, saying that individuals who have no legal knowledge of justice are forcing themselves upon the Judiciary .

Damad was also referring to a majority of Iranian clerical judges who happen to be ruling at the revolutionary courts, accusing them of lacking the academic background required for anyone who wants to be a judge.

After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, people with minimal educational background were appointed as judges as political appointees of the ruling clerics. As a result, many defendants and lawyers have pointed out that judges take their orders from the security forces and in fact the verdicts issued for political prisoners come from the intelligence organizations.

Damad also condemned the "unforgiveable" executions in the first years of the Islamic Republic as a stigma on the face of the Islamic government in Iran. He added that history will not forget the bloods spilled because of unfair and illegitimate punishment.

During the past three months as security forces have sent thousands of protesters to jail for taking part in protests, many inmates and their families have voiced concern about harsh treatment and brutality in Iranian jails and courts. Many inmates have complained that they have been denied the right to be represented by lawyers. As an example, Mashaallah Karami, whose son Mohammad Mehdi is in jail and sentenced to death told Etemad online that they have not been allowed to have their own lawyer. The court has appointed its own lawyer who does not answer his phone calls. Karami added that the revolutionary court tells the families that their children have apposed God and his prophet, while they were demanding democracy and freedom.

In an article published by Bloomberg December 15, headlined ‘A Democratic Iran is Coming and it will lead the Middle East,’ Robert Kaplan suggests that “nothing has the potential to change the region as much as a more liberal regime” in Iran.

Named by Foreign Policy magazine in 2011 and 2012 as ‘one of the top 100 global thinkers,’ Kaplan supported the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion on the basis that it would unleash what he told NPR in October 2002 was a “secular, urbanized developed tradition”. However, he was not alone in that optimistic assessment. Most of the US Congress and media were also believers in removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Unlike many Arab countries, Kaplan argues, Iran’s borders are not “artificial…drawn by Europeans.” This, he claims, Iran shares with the Persian Gulf emirates and kingdoms – although Saudi Arabia dates only to 1932.

Whatever his views about ‘democracy’ or ‘liberalism,’ Kaplan is firmly a realist. He notes “Saudi Arabia may understandably offend Western humanitarians” and expects the US to broker a future Iranian ‘normalization’ with Israel.

Noting Iran’s rich energy reserves, currently hemmed in by US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, Kaplan admires the doyen of the realist school, the US Secretary of State who saw Iran’s Pahlavi shah as a US ally against adversaries Iraq and the Soviet Union.

“Henry Kissinger told me that had the Pahlavi dynasty remained in power, Iran, given its strong state and civilizational richness,” Kaplan writes, “would have evolved into a constitutional monarchy with an economy comparable to South Korea’s.”

Kaplan’s commitment to real politic rather than ‘humanitarianism’ opens him to the possibility of a “post-clerical” Iran asserting itself regionally, perhaps “developing even stronger ties” with China than “Germany now has.” And Kaplan is also aware that a “somewhat chaotic, less centrally controlled” Iran might grapple with “large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkoman and Baluch minorities.”

A century of politics

The priority of Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, writing in the Wall Street Journal December 12, is disputing the assessment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that current unrest in Iran “poses no threat to the regime.”

Gerecht, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former ‘Iranian-targets’ CIA officer, championed, like Kaplan, the Iraqi and Afghan interventions. In March 2003, he signed a statement that US intervention in Iraq would help the “democratization of the wider Middle East.”

The problem was that most optimists on Iraq were simplifying the environment in the Middle East and not considering the Islamic Republic’s long-held policy of exporting its Shia ideology and playing the role of a spoiler.

WithTakeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Gerecht argues that the CIA has been misled by the “disappointing results of the Arab Spring and of Western military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Iran differs from the Arab world in its history since the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution, Gerecht and Takeyh write, with a century of Iranians’ “involvement in politics” under both Shahs and since 1979 the Islamic Revolution.

Iranians’ “critiques of authoritarianism,” they continue, have increased with the “massive expansion” or Iran’s “educational infrastructure” since 1979 with now “nearly six million university students, almost 60% of whom are women.”

Hence Iranians “are unlikely to fall victim again to the allure of a secular strongman or militant mullah, having seen the damage such leaders cause. The Arabs who revolted against tyranny a decade ago didn’t have the advantage of decades of trial and error. Self-criticism isn’t a Middle Eastern forte, but Iranians have come far in placing the blame for their own predicament on themselves.”

Gerecht and Takeyh rule out dangers of ethnic fragmentation and look forward to a “post-Islamic Iran…[with] a far bigger Western fan club that did the elected Islamists of North Africa.” Presumably evoking the Egyptian military regime that receives the second biggest chunk of US foreign aid after Israel, the pair cite Samuel Huntington – he of the ‘clash of civilizations’ – to note that US support for “nascent democracies increases the chance of their survival.”

NBC News reported Friday that Tiandy Technologies firm has used its facial recognition software to help Chinese authorities identify Uyghurs or other ethnic minorities. It has also provided Iran’s IRGC with the technology as well.

The Commerce Department sanctions against Tiandy restrict American firms from exporting components to the company.

The processors for Tiandy’s video recording systems were provided by California-based semiconductor giant Intel Corporation. However, Intel had removed references to Tiandy from its website before the decision was announced by the Biden administration, added NBC News.

Intel Corp. spokesperson Penny Bruce told NBC News Thursday that the company ceased doing business with the Chinese company “following an internal review.”

Tiandy is a private firm based in the northern city of Tianjin, which ranks among the top video surveillance companies in China and the world.

An industry survey says the annual sales revenue of Tiandy was more than $800 million in 2021, but it has branches in over 60 countries.

The Financial Times also wrote Thursday that Washington is set to put the chipmaker Yangtze Memory Technologies on a trade blacklist, in its latest efforts to target Chinese technology companies that it believes threaten the country’s security.

It comes two months after the Biden administration unveiled harsh export controls that made it more difficult for Beijing to acquire and produce advanced semiconductors.

TankerTrackers, Vortexa, Kpler, and other sources estimate Iran exported anywhere from 810,000 to 1.2 million barrels of crude oil per day in recent months. Iran keeps the export volume secret, but top officials constantly claim revenues are increasing.

But the US Energy Information Administration estimates that currently Iran’s daily crude exports are around 600,000 barrels. In addition, Iran is selling a maximum of 400,000 barrels of oil products such as diesel per day. So, the estimate about crude exports ranges from 0.6 to 1,2 million barrels, quite a large spread.

Iran also does not reveal how much it earns from crude oil exports, but if we take the lower estimate of 0.6 million shipments p/d and an average price of $90 p/b for 2022, revenues should total $20-22 billion for the 12 months of 2022.

The higher export volume estimate of one million barrels per day would return an annual revenue of about $32 billion.

The oil products Iran exports in addition to crude also generate roughly the same rate of income as crude oil. This means that if Iran has been selling 400,000 barrels p/d of these products, it earned about $13 billion in 2022.

Thus, total oil export revenues for the year ranges from $35-45 billion depending on which crude export volume is closer to reality.

These are rough estimates because we do not know how much discount Iran offers to its main buyer, China, and how much hard currency it recoups from the sales. Many observers believe Tehran might be bartering some of its oil to get food and other necessities. Also, using middlemen and illicit methods to conceal its shipments and repatriate cash amid US banking sanctions cost more money.

The prevailing financial situation in Iran is perhaps an indication that the lower estimate of its 2022 oil income might be closer to reality. Its currency, the rial, has fallen almost 30 percent in the past 12 months to a historic low of 380,000 against the US dollar.

The central bank has accelerated its habit of printing money to finance government operation and rescue inefficient state banks. Media in Tehran reported Thursday that in the past seven months the government has printed 1,000 trillion rials of money, while the currency was losing value.

If Iran’s oil exports were closer to $45 billion perhaps the currency would not have fallen so precipitously, because the exchange market in Tehran is not that big and the infusion of less than $100 million more every few days could have better supported the currency.

Popular anti-regime protests since September have put a lot of pressure on the government, that risks mass rebellion by a nation suffering from a 50-percent inflation rate and growing poverty.

The government’s official news website IRNA claimed Friday that daily exports have reached 1.5 million barrels, perhaps as a tactic to talk up the rial, but that is also a politically dangerous game because a public under tremendous financial pressure can ask where all the income has gone.

Politicians and pundits criticize their government for its over-reliance on China and Russia, nearly one week after the Gulf Cooperation Council met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and a joint statement was issued, which included a reference to the three islands, signaling Chinese support.

The government in Tehran in turn has voiced some mild criticism of China over the issue. It has said that the GCC statement also signed by Chinese President Xi Jinping undermines its territorial integrity. President Ebrahim Raisi has called on Beijing "to make up for the mistake," but no official response from China has been observed yet.

In a statement on Thursday, December 15, Iran's Reform Front, an umbrella organization of several reformist groups and political parties called China's stance "interventionist and opportunist."Meanwhile, the Reform Front, which is a loyal opposition to the clerical regime said that "This has been one of the worst and the most humiliating development in which Iran's tattered foreign policy has damaged the country's national authority."

The front's statement further expressed "deep regret" about what it called "Iran's foreign policy failure after Iran's involvement in the war in Ukraine based on Russian President Vladimir Putin's initiative."

The strongly worded statement was issued while reformists have been mending their badly damaged ties with the country's authoritarian ruler Ali Khamenei by not supporting anti-regime protests.

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The statement added that despite its occasional support for the Iranian regime, China would never miss a chance to take advantage of Iran's internal crises to expand its trade relations with Tehran's regional rivals. It also accused Moscow of the same sort of opportunism by convincing Tehran to get involved in the Ukraine war by supplying drones to Russia.

The unprecedented criticism of Khamenei's ‘Looking East’ policy by reformists continued with an article in the reformist Etemad newspaper by Esmail Gerami-Moghaddam the deputy leader of the reformist National Trust Party. He wrote that China's stance about the three islands sent a signal to the United States that like Washington, Beijing also believes Tehran’s regional ambitions should be checked.

Gerami-Moghaddam added that China preferred trade deals with Arab countries. "This shows that Tehran's policy of supporting stronger ties with China and its Looking East policy was a serious strategic miscalculation." However, Gerami-Moghaddam stopped short of saying that the architect of that policy was no one other than Khamenei.

Meanwhile, he argued that Iran could support Taiwan's independence and said China should accept to negotiate the fate of Taiwan. Gerami-Moghaddam recalled that since 2005 the Chinese insisted in their meetings with Iranian officials that Tehran should solve its problems with its neighbors and the United States.

In an interview with reformist Sharq daily, Ali Fekri the chairman of the Iranian Organization for Investment and Economic Assistance said that China chose not to invest in Iran and to transfer its capital and investments to other Persian Gulf states. He added that attracting foreign investment is not easy because of US sanctions. He maintained that last year, Russia was the biggest investor in Iran, but did not elaborate on the matter.

Iranian political analyst Ali Bigdeli told Nameh News that China's improving relations with Arab states does not mean that US influence in the region will diminish. Particularly, the US military and security relations with Persian Gulf Arab states is far more extensive to be affected with developments such as China's extended trade presence in the region.

Despite all these justifications, criticism of the Iranian government for over-reliance on China may continue for some time. On Thursday, Moineddin Saeedi, the member of Iranian Parliament from Chabahar in Sistan and Baluchistan Province, said at parliament: "Unlimited trust in China and Russia is sheer stupidity." He also criticized the Iranian government for "not giving the right response to China."