Prime Minister Naftali Bennett says the Islamic Republic will pay the price of targeting and threatening Israel on its own territory, implicitly confirming Israel’s role in the assassinations of IRGC officers.
During an interview with a New York Times columnist on June 21, Bennett said when Iranians “hit us through proxies or directly, they will pay a price in Iran.”
Describing what he calls his “Octopus doctrine,” he said Israel hits Tehran at the head of the octopus rather than its tentacles that have spread across the region.
Bennett added, “It turns out these guys are more vulnerable than they seem. The Iranian regime is rotten, corrupt — and incompetent.”
Bennet accused Tehran of “violating fundamental requirements” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and seeking to strike Israel directly using unmanned aerial vehicle.
Late in May, the New York Times quoted an Israeli intelligence official as saying that Tel Aviv has informed American officials it was responsible for the killing of Colonel Hassan Sayyad-Khodaei -- a member of IRGC’ Quds Force in Tehran, adding that the Israelis killed him as a warning to Iran to halt the operations of a covert group within the Quds Force known as Unit 840, tasked with abductions and assassinations of foreigners around the world, including Israeli civilians and officials. Israel later denied the country took responsibility for the assassination.
The meeting of the House of Commons subcommittee was held on Tuesday and attended by several political and human rights activists – including the spokesman of the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, Hamed Esmaeilion.
Kasra Aarabi, a senior analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, who specializes in Iran and Shiite Islamist Extremism, said that currently Revolutionary Guard officers have key administerial roles in the government of President Ebrahim Raisi, which seeks to consolidate the Islamic Republic’s grip across the Middle East. “Raisi is mandated to purify the regime,” he said, adding that the IRGC is the force behind this change.
He mentioned Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi – an IRGC general wanted by Interpol for his suspected role in the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing in Argentina that killed 85 people and injured over 300 – and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian – for his alleged affiliation with IRGC’s Quds Force – as examples of such appointments.
“Domestically, the IRGC is preparing to unleash a new wave of Islamization on the Iranian people to eradicate Western and Persian aspects of the Iranian society,” he said, noting that the majority of Iranians want a secular government, manifested on the streets with protests “growing in size and scale.”
“The 1999 unrest took place in three cities and seven people were killed. In 2009, protests were in 10 cities and around 100 people were killed. Iran’s protests in November 2019, however, saw protests in over 100 towns and cities and as many as 1,500 civilians were killed in just a few days,” he added. “Canada can and should support the Iranian people,” he concluded.
Author Maral Karimi said social instability in Iran is going to get worse in the foreseeable future, highlighting that “Canada’s commitment to democracy within its borders and beyond make it a moral and political imperative to support the organic and democratic movements” such as protests by Iranian teachers, drivers, laborers, and other sectors of the society.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an academic previously jailed in Iran for over two years, also recounted her ordeal at the hands of IRGC in Islamic Republic’s prisons, as well as gross violations of human rights towards Iranian political prisoners.
Ali Ehsassi, a member of the House of Commons, underlined that the Revolutionary Guards are responsible for many horrific developments in the Middle East and the repression of civil society in Iran.
Another member of the House, Arnold Viersen, also criticized the government for not designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization and not taking any specific action to hold it accountable for its crimes, including the intentional downing of the Ukraine Airlines Flight PS752.
The airliner was shot down by two air-defense missiles fired by the IRGC on January 8, 2020, as it took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport.
Esmaeilion, who lost his wife and daughter in the plane crash and has been campaigning for justice for the families of the victims ever since, said that 30 months have passed since the IRGC committed this “heinous crime over the skies of Tehran”, criticizing “Canada’s tepid and cautious approach to pursuing justice against the government of Iran.”
Not only has the Islamic Republic refused to cooperate to shed light on the incident, but also “it has systematically lied and misled to successfully impede the emergence of the factual matrix that led to this crime,” he said.
"Apart from deliberately obfuscating [the investigations], the Iranian government and the IRGC have subjected the relatives of the victims to crushing psychological pressure,” Esmaeilion said.
The inflation rate reported by the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) pertained to point-to-point calculation of rising prices, comparing the last Iranian calendar month of Khordad that ended June 20 with the same month in 2021.
Based on figures announced by SCI on June 22, overall point-to-point inflation rose by 52.5 percent, while non-food goods and services rose by 36.8 percent compared to the same month in 2021.
In early May, the government decided to end food import subsidies in place since 2018, that was allegedly abused by corrupt officials and businessmen to divert cheap dollars provided by the government, for non-essential imports.
The program of import subsidies cost the government $9-15 billion a year, depending on widely diverging figures quoted by different officials.
When the Iranian rial began to nosedive in early 2018, the government decided to offer cheap dollars for importing essential goods and commodities, such as wheat, animal feed, medicines, and a range of other items.
But rial’s decline continued without reprieve with the currency losing value ninefold by April 2022, as United States’ sanctions on Iranian oil exports and international banking imposed in 2018 continued.
Compared with the previous month this year (April21-May 20), the inflation index rose by 13.2 percent. But the shocking price jump was for the food sector with a 36.8 percent jump in one month.
However, the most politically significant and sensitive price increases were for cooking oil, bread and cereals.
Cooking oil jumped by 200 percent in one month and 250 percent compared with the same month in 2021. Bread and cereals jumped by 93.8 percent in one year and almost 20 percent compared to the previous 30-day period.
Dairy prices jumped by 47 percent in one month and 111 percent in one year.
However, the numbers published by the SCI still might not convey the real picture of rising prices. For example, in case of rents, the report showed an annual increase of 31.7 percent, while other reports speak of up to 100 percent rise in rental fees in the past few months, driving some lower middle class families into homelessness.
Protests began immediately in May after the government announced the elimination of food subsidies and have continued almost daily since then. Even government-controlled media are slamming the presidential administration for what they say is mismanagement of the economy.
Around 80 percent of the economy is directly or indirectly controlled by the state, which leads to planning nightmares, nepotism, political favoritism and corruption.
What helped the Islamic Republic to muddle through in past decades was oil export income, which has been significantly reduced by US sanctions imposed when the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA.
Year-long negotiations to revive the agreement have not succeeded, reportedly by Iran’s insistence for removal of sanctions imposed on its Revolutionary Guard, which is accused among other things of supporting terrorism.
With sanctions in place and an economy burdened by inefficiency, Iran’s financial situation will likely remain dismal, making the political atmosphere unstable in the country.
