by Joseph Klein
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 while Secretary 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.”
Khamenei and his henchmen are not in favor of Marxism as a replacement for capitalism. Their goal is a worldwide revolution based on Islamic principles. “Today the Islamic Republic’s claims concerning the futility of Marxism have been proven,” Khamenei said, “and its claims regarding capitalism are being proven, so religious scholars and the clergy should present the logical and deep-rooted truths of Islam to the increasing number of enthusiasts throughout the world by using firm rational principles which are appropriate for the needs of the modern audience. ”But the common thread uniting the Iranian leaders and the far Left today is “revolution” against their common enemy, capitalism.
When Occupy Wall Street protesters were asked by reporters what they were doing there, some said they wanted to topple capitalism. Early on, according to a New York Magazine poll, 37% of the protesters who said they were in it for the long haul agreed with the statement that “capitalism can’t be saved; it’s inherently immoral.”
While the number of protesters has grown considerably since then and their messages represent “a bouillabaisse of views,” as ABC News described them, the organizing and funding muscle lining up behind the protests is decidedly anti-capitalist. They include the Democratic Socialists of America, ACORN, the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the New Party and the Working Families Party.
Indeed, a former executive with SEIU, Stephen Lerner, had called last spring for a mass escalation of protests, strikes and civil disobedience to create crisis and revolution in America. Just the kind of destabilization of American capitalism that Khamenei had in mind.
“We have to think much more creatively,” said Lerner. “The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country.” A few months later Occupy Wall Street miraculously appeared, and unions like SEIU came forward to publicly endorse the supposedly spontaneous movement.
Former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones, a self-proclaimed communist and senior fellow at the far Left Center for American Progress (which also supports Occupy Wall Street), inspired the Occupy Wall Street crowd with words that Khamenei can relate to. Van Jones proclaimed last Friday to its mass General Assembly: “People are asking what we’re here to get. They don’t understand we’re not here to get anything. We’re here to give everything to the people from whom you stole everything!”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a frequent visitor to the Obama White House, also visited Occupy Wall Street last week and expressed his union’s solidarity. “We are going to support them in any way we can,” he promised. In a conference call with reporters he said the AFL-CIO has been pushing a similar agenda as that of the protesters.
Trumka’s agenda, like Khamenei’s, is the downfall of capitalism. He previewed his agenda last year when he said “…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.”
Occupy Wall Street and groups associated with the movement have gone global, planning protests around the world on October 15th. The goal, according to a message posted on Occupy Wall Street’s website, is to help bring about “one revolution in each single city of the world.”
The Iranian regime has its own goal of spreading revolution around the world and views capitalism’s demise as a necessary step to achieve that goal. It is more than happy to latch on to Occupy Wall Street to help achieve that objective.
Khamenei, Barack Obama and his base on the far Left – locked arm in arm in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and its global offshoots. How fitting.
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/14/khamenei-cheers-on-occupy-wall-street/
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