On Sunday, Muslim scholar Dr. Qanta Ahmed, appearing on Fox News, asserted of the despotic theocratic Islamic regime in Iran in 1979, “I do think this regime for the first time ever is seriously threatened.”
Asked how weak the Iranian regime is right now, Ahmed answered, “It’s in its most fragile and precarious time probably since 1979. They’ve had a disastrous outcome in their attempt at intimidating the United States; their attempts on the embassy in Baghdad failed; they’ve had Qassem Soleimani decapitated; they’ve had to admit that they shot down their own commercial airliner killing hundreds of people, 83 Iranians, many Iranians have lost multiple family members. The devastation in Canada is extraordinary because Canada is a huge country with a small population. It’s been a calamity and they also briefly arrested the British ambassador and Britain threatened them that they’re either going down the avenue of total pariah status globally or they now have to accept that they deal with the international community.”
Fox News’ Pete Hegseth asked if the fact that the Iranian regime initially lied about their responsibility for the downed Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 would trigger Iranians to feel that the Iranian regime had lied to them many times before.
Ahmed answered: “I think the Iranians have to ask themselves what else have they concealed; it wasn’t just the error; they denied it at first; then finally they’re admitting it. Now they want to know what other falsehoods have been fed. And also their population are sacrificial animals, loss of life; as you’ve mentioned just now 1500 people were killed in recent protests in Iran before the Qassem Soleimani execution. So they are finally able to voice what they’ve suspected all along.”
Ahmed stated, “And we must not ignore those voices. President Trump made a wonderful statement on Twitter in Farsi and in English that the United States was with the people of Iran; we have no enmity with the people of Iran, but we do despise the Islamic Iranian theocratic regime which is a totalitarian regime. They’ve had that country for 41 years shrouded totally suffocated in oppression since then, and I think we’re seeing that veil coming off.”
One Fox host noted former President Obama’s different reaction when protests were launched against the Iranian regime in 2009. Ahmed responded, “So well said. I remember this image in my mind of President Obama watching the protests in Washington on television and restrained — when in 2008 he had the speech in Cairo talking about the U.S. engagement with the Muslim world. That was his ‘hallmark,’ was engagement. But in reality he was engaging secretly with the Iranian regimes at the expense of the Iranian people. That was on June 12. The protest on June 20 we remember Neda Agha-Soltan, the young girl who went to protest with her music teacher and was shot to death on camera and the entire world saw her die. This is a legacy so that her death was not in vain if we can help the Iranian people realize their dream.”
Asked if Iran would come to the negotiating table, Ahmed responded, “Many experts have been speaking about that. I can’t imagine it because the more they are threatened, the more Promethean their grip. They would have to completely deny their origin, this regime. I do think this regime for the first time ever is seriously threatened. People are saying, ‘The United States is not our enemy; the regime is our enemy; our enemy is not here in the U.S.; it is here where we are in Tehran.’ And that kind of explicit speech, I’ve never encountered.”
Ahmed noted, “There’s been an incredible ricochet over the last week. Because a week ago they were mourning their leader, and the size of those crowds, millions; that could not have been orchestrated. That was an organic response, the humiliation of the nation. But also, this is a nation that has been cultivated in forty years of idolizing martyrdom; an Islamic regime, like any totalitarian regime, needs an external enemy to bind the population. An external enemy, what could be better than the United States or Israel? So there may be a lot of indoctrination, but at the same time there’s a huge intellectual class; all those Iranians killed on that flight, many of them were academics in North America. They understand the reality and they see through it. So there are many Iranians that are greatly pro-American. In fact the Iranian diaspora of 2009 was begging the United States to support the Green Revolution and we failed them.”
She concluded, “And we must not fail them now though we are seasoned after seeing the Arab Spring turn into a Arab winter, so this must come from the Iranian people, but we must help them. We must give them satellite communications, hot spot Wi-Fis. our agencies must help them in whatever way, money, arms even if they need it.”
Hegseth interjected, “All the things the Obama administration never did in 2009.”
Ahmed agreed: “Put a stop on even though the advisors recommended many of those things.”