Rafsanjani: ‘Moderate’ or godfather of the state-sponsored terrorism?

The sudden death of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani at age 82 caused significant concern among the so-called Iranian reformists, re-branded as ”moderates” during the last Presidential election.

Since his death on January 8, 2017, many news agencies and propaganda machines have been trying to create a new face for the fourth Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani despite many of the crimes attached to his name nationally and internationally. His name has not been the least among many of the Iranian regime’s high profile figures wanted by Interpol for terrorism in the last two decades.

From the AMIA terror attack to the Mykonos restaurant assassinations, Mr Rafsangani played the key role in advancing the international terror agenda of the Iranian regime during his presidential tenure.

In fact Rafsanjani’s terrorist activities, can be traced back as far as the sixties, where he was linked to the assassination of Prime Minister Mansoor, during the Pahlavi reign.

Moreover, since the first days of the Iranian revolution of 1979, his shadow has been seen in many unclaimed terror attacks against rival Mullahs and revolutionaries. He has also a fair share of responsibility in the mass executions during the first decade of Islamic Republic reign.

During his last years in office as the fourth President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a series of political assassinations were carried out under the supervision of Mr Rafsanjani’s Intelligence ministry. The elimination of nearly two dozen prominent Iranian figures in atrocious ways and a series of terror attacks on political activists and key opposition figures in Europe, such as the assassination of Dr Shapour Bakhtiar in France happened under the direct supervision of Mr Rafsanjani.

During his two terms of Presidency, he introduced two sets of development programs which many experts believe have resulted in devastating social and economic catastrophes, such as the rapid growth of drug addicts and the destruction of small and medium size businesses by his reckless and miscalculated privatization of industries.

Mr Hashemi Rafsanjani is the key figure behind the expansion of the IRGC from a military organization to a massive, uncontrollable, enterprise whose mad agenda resulted in a national economic monopoly and regional instability across the Middle East as this political, economic and military enterprise caused unrest in places such as Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In fact, in the early nineties, it was Mr Hashemi Rafsanjani who allowed the IRGC to become involved in economic activities and ordered them to become self-sufficient financially.

One of the primary money making areas for the IRGC during those years was dam constructions, which occurred in an unprecedented number, and resulted, decades later, in a great ecological disaster and is still one of the most significant challenges for Iran in years to come.

After the 2009 post-election unrest, Mr Hashemi supposedly changed sides, yet never crossed the red lines of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary ideology. Therefore, crediting him as the symbol and leader of Iran’s moderate movement is laughable.

In fact, nothing reformist or moderate, in the sense we understand in the West, ever existed in the Islamic regime’s political sphere.

What they are trying to coin for the last few decades as ”reformist” or ”moderate” is nothing but a slightly less fundamentalist version of revolutionary.

Ideals of the Islamic Republic of Iran geared toward showing a friendlier facade to the West and a modicum if respect for human rights on the International stage. Reformists or Moderates or whatever they may call themselves, have no responsibility except to act as a pressure relief valve for the Islamic Republic by providing the illusion of a power balance, thereby dampening the pressures for a regime change and extend the life of the Islamic Republic.

Mohsen Behzad Karimi, an Iranian political commentator once correctly said: ‘’The real characteristic of Iranian regime moderates is tangible only by comparing them to hardliners as we compare Taliban to ISIS. ‘’