Iran's killer President

 Dominic Green:

The president is a placeholder for the people who really run the country. The elections were rigged. And most of the American media cheers along.

No, not the United States: Iran. The peace-loving, centrifuge-spinning, flag-burning regime has a new president, Ebrahim Raisi. The Biden administration did promise us a new era in US-Iranian relations, and here it is: Raisi will be the first Iranian president to take office while under sanctions for mass murder.

In the 1980s, Raisi was a young regional prosecutor. He was part of a four-man ‘death committee’ which ordered the disappearance and killing of thousands of the Islamic revolution’s enemies. You may be shocked to hear human rights’ groups claiming that due process was frequently ignored during this judicial massacre.

This wasn’t just youthful exuberance. Amnesty International notes that when protests against the clerical dictatorship broke out in 2019, Raisi, as head of the Iranian judiciary, granted blanket impunity to government officials and security forces responsible for unlawfully killing hundreds of men, women and children, and subjecting thousands of protesters to mass arrests and at least a hundred to enforced disappearance, and torture and other ill-treatment’.

Raisi is what Hannah Arendt would have called a schreibtischtäter, a ‘desk murderer’: a functionary who orders dirty work while keeping his own hands clean. Amnesty calls for his prosecution for ‘crimes against humanity’. The New York Times, adopting the vocabulary of Clueless, calls this an ‘awkward predicament’ for American diplomats. It’s more than awkward, and more than clueless: it’s deeply incoherent and dangerous.
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There is much more.

Biden's incoherent push for a deal with these mass murderers is inexplicable.  The Iranians should be taken at their word that they seek genocide against their enemies.