Is Ahmadinejad Planning A Coup Against The Mullahs?

By Findalis
Monkey in the Middle

Word is leaking out of Iran that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning an end-run around the ruling Mullahs and is planning to take full control of Iran.

Ahmadinejad's second and last term of office expires in June.  It is very highly unlikely the Mullahs will support him in another term of office.  In fact, reports show they and the Revolutionary Guard are grooming his successor.  A man who will do their bidding, be their mouthpiece, and follow orders without question.

From Debka:

In the unexpected role of social crusader, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech at Kermanshah Wednesday, Jan. 2, “The country’s economy should not be controlled by 3,000 or 10,000 people.” Seventy-six million Iranians still don’t benefit from the country’s oil revenues – “only an elite minority,” he said.

Predictably, Debkafile’s Iranian sources report, the Iranian president’s relations and friends are rushing for the exits: they are selling property and packing their bags ready to quit the country, worried about his fate and their own, as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his powerful machine prepared to hit back.

Ahmadinejad is certainly in for serious persecution even before his six months as president are up in June. In his second four-year term as president, he made enemies of the most powerful parts of the ruling establishment: He attempted to overshadow the Supreme Leader, brushed aside the advice of his mentor, the influential religious figure Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, and dared to poke a finger in the eye of the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, by asking why they controlled and profited from the largest slice of the nation’s assets instead of the people.

Now they are all gunning for him, using as their political bludgeon allegations of financial corruption.

But Ahmadinejad has not been put off. Although he sees his undoing written large on the wall, at every opportunity, before even small audiences of 300-400 people, he continues to maintain that the only way the country can save itself is by forcing the redistribution of national wealth.

His message goes down well in the Iranian street and he is beginning to build a grass-roots power base that may help protect him from retribution by Khamenei and his henchmen. The “elite minority,” which need to be relieved of their assets, was easily understood to impugn the super-rich, like Khamenei’s own son Mojtaba and some of the Revolutionary Guard commanders.

Our sources in Tehran say that many of his associates have already taken the precaution of removing themselves to safety in the United States or Europe; others are keeping their heads down or knocking on the president’s door to wangle foreign postings so long as he has the clout to disburse them. One such prominent figure is Hamid Baqa’I, the president’s deputy for executive affairs. In two months, he is due to take up the post of Iranian ambassador to UN institutions in Geneva and New York, in place of the incumbent Mohammad Khaza’i. Ahmadinejad is going through the motions of promoting his close aide Esfandyar Rahim Masha’I, who is also the father of his daughter-in-law, as presidential contender in June. But he knows it is a lost case. Masha’i is also likely to end up at a foreign posting with his family, when his candidacy is disqualified by the Guardian Council of the Constitution which is under Khamenei’s thumb.

Foreign appointments also appear to be in the works for some other members of Ahmadinejad’s inner circle, such as Seyyed Hossein Moussavi, Malek-Zadeh and others.

But not all his hangers-on are getting a sympathetic hearing. Our sources in Tehran have learned that the president lost patience this week when a bunch of his cronies confronted him with demands for cushy overseas appointments. He threatened instead to fire some of them Under heavy criticism for mismanaging the Iranian economy, he may use the opportunity to assign the blame to his less favorite advisers, sweep them out and replace them with new faces. One of the most prominent heads on the block may be First Vice President and de facto prime minister Mohammad Reza Rahimi.

Rahimi stirred an international furor by his anti-Semitic remarks which accused Jews of “spreading narcotics around the world in accordance with the teachings of the Talmud … whose objective is the destruction of the world.” He almost outperformed his boss, now turned social crusader, who more than once attracted international condemnation for his inflammatory remarks about Israel and Jews.

Most recently, Ahmadinejad called his close cronies together for a pep talk. He told them he held an insurance policy for his and their survival: the secret dossiers of 300 top Iranian officials containing detailed records of their misdeeds. He obtained them by rifling the archives of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security during the brief period after he sacked the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, and before Khamenei forced him to reinstate the minister a week later.

He and his staff had meanwhile combed through the incriminating files and made copies of them which were now held safe in the presidential office.

Khamenei, who has the support of the bulk of Iran’s political and military leaders, knows all about Ahmadinejad’s plans and is determined to eliminate him one way or another and make sure that the 300 dossiers never leave the president’s office.

More than once, Ahmadinejad has implied recently that he would make their contents public if he or members of his clique were charged with corruption or the misappropriation of state funds. For now, he is weeding out of his administration the officials he regards as its Achilles heels – according to our sources, the first scheduled to go are Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi and Interior Minister Mohammad Mostafa Najjar.

The Iranian Oil Ministry is a notorious hotbed of financial embezzlement, whereas the Interior Ministry is responsible for organizing the upcoming presidential election a and Ahmadinejad would prefer one of his confidantes to be sitting in that office. Only last week, he sacked Health Minister Marzieh Wahid Dastjerdi for remarking that Ahmadinejad prefers to earmark foreign currency for importing dog food rather than medicines. Her dismissal put many backs up against the president in the top echelons of government.

President Ahmadinejad was publicly warned this week to shut his mouth and stop ruining his reputation by Esma’il Kovsari, Khamenist adherent and powerful parliamentary voice. Kovsari pointed out that the Revolutionary Guards helped Ahmadinejad come to power as president and supported him on many occasions and so he must not turn his back on them now.

Another supporter of Khamenei, Al Sa’idi, said that most regime heads are now sorry they brought Ahmadinejad to power because he has become a different person.

Does this royal battle within the Iranian establishment affect its nuclear plans? The answer is no. Will crucifying the president cause rioting over the summer election? Not likely. Politically, Ahmadinejad is on his way out and leaves the stage to the most radical elements of the regime. And physically? Well, car accidents are a common feature of the Iranian political scene.

I wonder if there are rumblings of an Iranian Spring.  There was one 4 years ago, but unlike the Arab Spring of 2 years ago, President Barack Hussein Obama sided with Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs.  An opportunity to destroy the reign of the Mullahs lost.  Now Ahmadinejad is trying to start and Arab Spring without him being thrown out of power.

A President with a "ceremonial" role, a ruling elite of religious fanatics who are living in the 7th Century and not the 21st, a elite military group that will lose its power if the mullahs are defeated, and add to this a nuclear program coming to completion and there is a recipe for a disaster.  A disaster that might spread not only to Iran's neighbors, but to the whole Muslim world.

Iran May Kill Pastor Yosef Nadarkhani In Secret

With the Godless Islamic regime in Iran nothing is sacred.  No promise, no law, no word of honor.  If the Mullahs wish to do something, they will do it.  Take the case of Pastor Yosef Nadarkhani.

An Iranian pastor facing death a death sentence for refusing to renounce his Christian faith and embrace Islam is expected to spend another year in jail, awaiting an appeal on his death sentence, while government authorities try to force him to convert to Islam.

However, the delay could be a ruse and the Iranian government could kill him in secret, warns the founder of Present Truth Ministries, which was the first to report on Pastor Yosef Nadarkhani’s arrest in October 2009.

That’s the most recent development in Nadarkhani’s religious and political nightmare of more than two years, according to The Christian Post.

Nadarkhani, who has been jailed since he was arrested and charged with apostasy, came within two days of being hanged in September until Iranian court officials — perhaps influenced by international outrage from the Rev. Franklin Graham, House Speaker John Boehner, and other notables around the world — decided to let him appeal the sentence.

The 34-year-old Nadarkhani, who became a Christian at the age of 19, was tried and convicted in December 2010. The pastor of several home congregations in a small Christian community called the Church of Iran, he has refused repeatedly to recant his faith.

The apostasy charge stems from the government’s allegation that he converted from Islam to Christianity, while his defense claims that he had not been a Muslim before becoming a Christian. The government contends that he was a Muslim because he was born into a Muslim household.

He refused three times during the three days running up to his execution date to recant, and his death appeared to be imminent until he received a reprieve of sorts.

The evangelical pastor’s lawyer was confident at one time that his conviction would be reversed. But he was told that Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, the head of Iran’s judiciary, asked the presiding judge to delay judgment on his appeal and keep him in prison for another year, the Christian Post reported last month.

The deliberate delay is meant to let the case “slip away from international attention” even as the authorities continue to “use whatever means necessary to cause him to convert to Islam,” the Christian Post quotes Present Truth Ministries’ Jason DeMars as saying.

The case has taken several outrageous turns since Nardakhani’s arrest, including the arrest of his wife in an attempt to force him to recant, as well as the addition of other trumped-up charges of rape, security violations, and Zionism that Iranian officials added around the execution date. That was the first time in the two-year process that such charges had been mentioned, and many observers regarded the additional charges as an effort to rationalize the death penalty.

Various reports have indicated that his health is deteriorating in prison.

Although the Iranian court very well could wait another year before deciding Nadarkhani’s fate, “there are no assurances that he will not be executed,” DeMars warned. “It could happen at any time. This is the way that the Iranian government operates with executions. They do not give advance notice, and it is done in secret.”

Source

We have to keep the heat on Iran and the Mullahs.  We must be firm in our conviction with them that the death of Pastor Yorsef Nadarkhani will be considered an act Murder by their government and we will take action.

And our prayers are needed for this courageous Man-of-G-d.  We need to ask G-d to be with him as he is going through his trials and tribulations.

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

Kill the Protesters!

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

That is the cry from Ayatollah Mehyaddin Haeri Shirazi on Iran Television recently in a live interview.  (View it here.)

In a live interview broadcast on the Islamic Republic's national television station sometime within the last two weeks, Ayatollah Mehyaddin Haeri Shirazi described a Communist protest movement from the early years of the Islamic Republic, noting how it was effectively crushed by the authorities. The government targeted opposition activists, he said, "arrested them in the afternoon and the same night announced the names of 30 people killed or executed by the government forces."

In reaction to the arrests and killings, Shirazi continued, "nothing happened. Why? Because they killed them."

Expanding on what he sees as the lesson from those events, the ayatollah said,"The more of them [the opposition] are killed, the more beneficial [to the people]. If the armed forces kill some of them, it is to our benefit."

On the other hand, Shirazi continued, "When they are arrested, it is bad [for public opinion], when they are captured [it is bad for public opinion]. Do not make victims out of them."

Killing the opposition protesters, the ayatollah insists, "is sanctioned by obedience to Allah and the prophet and is handed down to the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Khamenei]. When it is sanctioned by such a power, there is no need to go through the government powers."

Shirazi warned the opposition forces, "Do not look upon the Supreme Leader [simply] as a person with a soft turban on his head, and that you can beat him. His support comes from the Hidden Imam Mahdi, he [Khamenei] is made of iron. It will come back down to break your own heads."

Perhaps in reaction to the increasing levels of violence by government forces, on December 26 a previously unknown anti-regime group calling itself the National Iranian Armed Resistance Forces (NIRU) "declare our readiness to rise to the armed defense of our nation against the forces of the criminal, illegitimate, transgressing and occupying current Government of Iran...." The group "accuses the current government and the leader of the Islamic Revolution, Mr. Sayyed Ali Khamenei of legal transgressions and high treason of nation and homeland."

NIRU claims to be made up of "a number of officers, soldiers and personnel of the armed forces", calling for "support" and "cover... in this moral and nationalist act" from "our brothers and sisters serving with the armed security forces of Iran...."

Iranian pro-democracy activists in contact with Israel National News said they are hesitant to believe in the authenticity of the organization until there is some external evidence of its activities beyond email and Web postings.

The first of two NIRU communiques, headed with praise for the Islamic god Allah, explained: "In accordance with the regulations of the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we are commissioned to protect the lives, properties and honor of our nation, and defend our sacred soil, as well as combat all occupying forces within the borders of the land. Any failure in carrying out this duty is considered a betrayal of nation and oath. According to the constitution, the defense of the rights of the nation of Iran, and avoidance of the collapse of the country takes precedence over protection of the ruling regime."

The group announced "the initiation of Operation Azadi ('Freedom')," which they said will end upon "unconditional surrender of the occupying government and leadership." The operation, the NIRU communique said, will involve taking control of military bases, taking over government buildings, arrest of "government-supporting agents within your units", "seizing... military and public communication facilities, as well as other news media", "combat mission[s] at the regional level, and expanding", and more.

Read the full story here.

Ayatollah Mehyaddin Haeri Shirazi has a wonderful nickname in Iran:  Land Thief.  For he has stolen thousands of acres of land in Shiraz and became a billionaire doing it.  So he is scared of what will happen to him if Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs are overthrown.

If the National Iranian Armed Resistance Forces (NIAR) is an actual group of resistane and not a front group set up by the Iranian government to destroy the Green Revolution, then it brings a whole new dynami to the Iranian equation.  For then the world will have an Iran in a very bloody civil war. Waged on one side by the Mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard, on the other side by the Protesters and the regular army.

The side that is victorious in this will become stronger than ever, the losers will be executed.  Thus is the way with despots.

Now is the time for the leaders of the Free World to speak up and be heard.  To speak words of encouragement to the people of Iran longing for Freedom, Justice and Liberty.  For the people of Iran who wish to throw off the tyrant who has destroyed their nation (physically and spiritually).  And still, President Obama says nothing.  His silence on this is deafening.

This is not the time to be silent Mr. President.  It is the time for you to stand up and speak to the people of Iran.  Not the Mullahs or Ahmadinejad.  The people who are fighting for the Freedom and Liberty that you take for granted.

The Iranin government has rejected your hand of friendship.  Now is the time for you to end your vacation, and become the Leader of the Free World.  If you fail on this, and the people of Iran are resubjegated into the slavery and despair that they have lived under these last 30 years, the verdict of history will be damning of you.  Your legacy will be one of incompetence and stupidity.  You will have shown the world that you are nothing more than a 2-bit street hustler who made it big!