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A car bomb in the Iranian capital Tehran has killed another nuclear scientist and his driver, and injured at least one bystander.
On Wednesday morning, an unknown motorcyclist attached a sticky bomb to Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan’s car near Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran.
In November 2011, some of the US presidential hopefuls called for conducting covert operations ranging from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists to launching a military strike on Iran as well as sabotaging Tehran’s nuclear program.
The calls for assassinations are not idle threats as a number of Iranian scientists have been assassinated over the past few years. Professor Majid Shahriari and Professor Masoud Ali-Mohammadi are among the victims of these acts of terror.
In an interview with Press TV, Nader Mokhtari, a columnist and commentator, shares his thoughts on the issue.
Below is the transcription of the interview:
Press TV How likely is this to be another terrorist incident?
Mokhtari It is very likely that it is a terrorist incident, it is a copycat attack , we had Mr. Shahriari last year who was assassinated in exactly the same way, it was a sticky bomb attached to the door of his car — that is the way he was killed. Of course, in that incident, the instigators were apprehended and they were found to have been trained in Israel and inserted into Iran via the Republic of Azerbaijan border and this incident is very similar to that. Quite frankly, it is appalling, Allameh Tabatabi University is a top university in Tehran but it is not in any shape or form affiliated with Iran’s nuclear program so I think it is just a senseless killing of another one of Iranian intelligentsia.
Having said that, let’s look at this: there were US statesmen who go on TV and declare that they want to kill innocent people in other part of the world simply because they accuse a nation of one thing or another and there is no connection here.
I have to tell you that all of this libeling of Iran and all the muck being thrown at Iran, in my mind, has little to do with whether Iran has a nuclear weapons program or not because they know full well that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. It is to do with the growth and progress of Iranian youth, because at the end of the day, that is what they are most of afraid of, and that is what they fear and that is what they are envious about. From 32 years under sanctions, our youth have been able to put satellites into space, take the county into becoming one of the top stem cell and genetics sciences countries in the world and in the field of nanotechnology, you name it, and they have done this under sanctions, with an eight year war, with the terrorist attacks on the country, with the economic pressure, and that is what they are jealous about and that is what they want to stop.
Press TV Let’s look at the environment that seems to have been created. You alluded to the fact that some American politicians talking about assassinating [Iranian] professors and [doing] anything they could to stop Iran’s nuclear program. What, in your perspective, needs to be done to change such an environment; it is like old West mentality and environment that certain countries can get away, literally, with murder and not be condemned in international circles?
Mokhtari They cannot get away with murder. The US has just sold its top of the line jets that it would never otherwise have sold to an unstable regime in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia so that through its proceeds and through the fractions of reserve, it has enough money to run itself for another year; this is how desperate is the situation in the US, many people don’t realize. But printing money from nowhere, from nothing has come to an end for the US and it is even complete financial mess, at the same time the Obama administration is one of the most corrupt administrations in the US history and all of that will come out in time.
Having said that, the US has not come out of this unscathed, killing a million Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans and God knows how many other people all over the world, there is not return results anymore. The US is just bad portrait and everybody is beginning to realize this, not least its European friends who is struggling with a debt burden that will take many years to clear up.
Press TV Let’s look at the Israeli involvement in all of this, how likely is that?
Mokhtari Very likely, Israel is the evil high priest, if we were to visualize the 1950s movies, it is the grand Vazier, it carries out all the nasty work for its chief — the US and AIPAC in America — and creates insatiability, it certainly has the kill teams, it has assassinations teams and it has plain terrorist teams that carry out this kind of work where the CIA has no reach and whether other agencies have no reach. Such operations generally does involve other agencies such as MI6 and the CIA and getting the logistics together for this kind of an operation is generally the work of more than one agency in the region. The experience has shown that attacks of this type have had Mossad, the MI6 and the CIA operating along each other it is not just one agency.
Press TV How likely it that a lot of these terrorist attacks are being carried out not to stop nuclear program but simply out of frustration to try to have an effect on the overall morals of Iranians and also the people who are in this specific field?
Mokhtari One thing that the world has realized, at least 145 counties have let America and its band of allies know is that wherever Iranians go, construction and peace follows behind and wherever America and its allies go, bloodshed and murder follows hot on their heels. this is to try and break down the Iranian morale and to do damage to any optimism that there might be in Iran about the future but it will get nowhere. I think what happens is that murder of these people who are not, as far as I know, directly connected to anything in particular, just hardens the opinions against the US, Israel and the UK and multiplies people’s hatred of these nations and the enmity that is being felt across Iran against these countries.
Press TV Just a couple of days ago, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei talked about a campaign to try to break the spirit of the Iranian nation. How likely is it that such types of incidents would have a negative effect on theoverall moral of the Iranian nation?
Mokhtari They don’t affect the moral as such, I think they are counter-productive. I have no idea why the Obama administration is undertaking such moves because, if anything, it emboldens the resolve of the Iranian people to get on. At the end of the day, we have our youth and their future to worry about and we’d like them to proceed as best as they can. We had America, just a few days ago, saying that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and two days ago we had a very red faced Mr. Panetta[the US Defense Secretary] going on air and saying actually we made a mistake yet again, for the 100th time, and Iran does not have nuclear weapons program. So this is just pure bloody thuggery and murder and terrorism by people who say they are fighting terrorism. You will find the theorists all in the Knesset and in the White House and in the US Senate and in the British parliament and there are no other terrorist in the world
Press TV Let’s look at the US Congress. Why do you think that a nation like the US, if it is implicated in this incident, would prefer this type of assassination policy or a very heavy-handed approach instead of trying to go from another direction in this year of 2012. Would a diplomatic approach not have a better effect?
Mokhtari The only diplomacy the US knows is that the US [preference] are those countries that have their bellies tickled and act like pets, there are countries in the region that are like that and ruled by absolutely despotic families who just say ‘yes’ to whatever the US wants and remain in power, regardless of their atrocious record.
The US wants a master-servant relationship in a friendship whereas Iran’s type of friendship, as dozens of countries around the world would testify, is to do with mutual respect, understanding and cooperation and that is how Iranians goes about things.
The US wants a pet in the Middle East, wants total control and wants everything to be done as it pleases. Well, those days are long gone, countries in the US backyard, like Brazil that have replaced Britain on the ladder of economic powers, they are not willing to listen to this nonsense anymore, they have their own national interests and their own future interests top get on with and the US line is becoming a worn line, it is becoming threadbare and less and less people are willing to listen to it.
Now if Washington wants to place the fault with Iran for this, it is mistaken. It is a changing world and the US is desperate, it is flat broke at the moment and there is very little that it can do about events taking place around the world
You saw the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner running to China for money yesterday, it is ridiculous, the US is totally broke and they have to go and get more and more loans from China and sell the future of American people to the Chinese, just so they can get their political aims forward. It is ridiculous, it is the wrong road to go and if anybody in the US is advocating this, they have to tell the American people that they are wrong and if they don’t do anything to stop this runaway politics being implemented by a handful of people, then the future of the US democracy itself is at stake.
Press TV How likely is this a message for countries, such as Iran that try to seek an independent path, that they have to pay a price. We know the 2011 saw the beginning of the Islamic Awakening, and every day we are witnessing more and more people around the world are taking to the streets and demanding their governments to be overthrown and have a government representative of itself. With something like this that happened inside Iran, do you think that it will have a negative effect on the people who are involved in these movements or no it doesn’t?
Mokhtari The Middle East is the mess of the Western making. Iran has paid a huge price for trying to maintain its this independent, the Iran-Iraq war was backed by the US and 36 other countries, many of them Western countries, they armed Saddam Hossein with chemical and biological weapons, the Iraqi people paid the price while Saddam Hossein ruled over them and the Iraqi people then had to pay the price yet again for the US puppet to be removed from the power and this is totally unacceptable. So you do understand that the resolve of Iran and Iranians is such that they are not stuck in such a situation so that they are forever divorced from such induced plight, as we saw in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Press TV Iran has witnessed many terrorist attacks over the 32 years of the Islamic Republic history. It seems that that more these things happen, we see more and more Iranians take to the streets I support of the government and condemning international forces. How do you attribute the overall reaction by the Iranian nation in face of such terrorist events?
Mokhtari Iranians, regardless of what has been done to them for the last three decades, the government has become a rallying point for the people, the Islamic Republic is a rallying cry for the people and whenever there are external threats, the people tend to rally behind the Islamic Republic because they did it once during the Iran-Iraq war and it left many countries empty-handed and in debt and these countries were ruled by the US and Israel and British puppets and Iranian people do that because there is security in numbers and there is security in unity. So people pull together. If you have a constant external threat and constant drum of war and saber rattling from the US, Britain, France, Israel, then that has the opposite effect and it unites the people. I am wondering what Tel Aviv, London and Washington’s game is for doing this because they know exactly that it is counterproductive.
MN/JR