Hardest of the Hardliners to Choose Iran’s Next Supreme Leader

The Iran Threat

Hardest of the Hardliners to Choose Iran’s Next Supreme Leader

Another Obama "echo chamber" lie exposed.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | May 25, 2016

The next Supreme Leader of Iran will be chosen by the Assembly of Experts, a super-parliamentary body of Iranian clerics. The new leader of that assembly is Ahmad Jannati, a notorious hardliner who had his own son executed for belonging to an opposition party. He is completely attached to the faction of current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Jannati is also the head of Iran’s Guardian Council, which closes a kind of circle in Iran’s leadership. The Assembly of Experts is itself elected by Iran’s main parliament, the Majlis. However, all candidates for the Majlis — as well as for the Assembly of Experts and the Presidency of Iran — must be approved by the Guardian Council, which Jannati heads. Thus, Jannati approved the candidate slates for the parliament that elected the Assembly of Experts, which then in return appointed him to lead it. He now heads both ends of the circle, and sits in the right positions to determine the membership of the Majlis, the next President of Iran, and the next Supreme Leader of Iran.

Thereby hangs a tale.

After a resolution of disapproval for Obama’s Iran deal was filibustered by his allies in the Senate, President Obama proceeded to act as if the deal had been ratified by the Senate. The Majlis elections in Iran were the first major political event in Iran following Obama’s signature on the deal. It was thus crucial to his image here at home that the elections go well for his favored side, the moderates and reformers Obama pretended to support.

However, Jannati disqualified 99% of moderate and reform candidates before the elections. There was no hope of them winning, because they weren’t allowed to run. That is proven by the smoothness with which Jannati was able to solidify his control of Iran’s government following the Majlis elections.

So what did the President of the United States do? He lied, or rather, he put his “echo chamber” to lying. Media outlets across America reported that the Majlis elections had gone to the reformers — the same reformers who weren’t even allowed to run.

[T]he White House’s pet journalists fell all over themselves making sure that every outlet in America described the post-deal elections in Iran as a victory, inevitably, for the theocracy’s “moderates.” They described the election in glowing terms, as if it were a clear endorsement of openness brought about by Obama’s wisdom.

Rather, the elections should have been seen as a rebuke of the president’s policy, as 99 percent of reformist candidates were disqualified before any votes were ever cast. To even compete, so-called “moderate” parties were forced to accept hard-liners loyal to Khamenei. The elections thus cemented hard-liner control of Iran as never before. Ayatollah Khamenei, to underline this, declared that anyone who thought that the future of Iran was in diplomacy instead of missiles was either a fool or a traitor. But if you read it in American newspapers, thanks to Rhodes, you’d think that Iran has continued moderating in a positive direction.

That article gets it exactly right: the elections solidified hard-liner control of Iran like never before. Khamenei’s hand-picked ally, Jannati, now sits atop both the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts. The next Supreme Leader will be chosen by him. The Majlis parliament’s potential members were all chosen by him before the Iranian public was ever allowed to vote. The hard-liner faction now owns all the levers of power in Iran, but our President has contrived to make sure that the American people don’t know it.