This is just a glimpse of anti-American rhetoric made in a country with which President Obama seems eager to have talks without pre-conditions:
The Iranian daily, Jomhouri-ye Eslami, states in an article January 5th, that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were established by the U.S. and Britain with funding from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It goes on to say that the recent attacks perpetrated by these organizations - the Christmas Day attempted bombing and the attack on the CIA in Khost - were ordered by the Americans and the British to provide a pretext for launching a new war in Yemen and Afghanistan.
“Whenever Washington needs some incident or special terror operation to justify its new plans,” states the Iranian daily, “the hands of the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders suddenly emerge from their sleeves to carry out acrobatic terror operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the heart of Europe, and even above the Atlantic Ocean.”
A few weeks later, in an article published January 21st, another Iranian daily, Kayhan, stated that "the American-Zionist empire" was responsible for both the recent cold wave in the northern hemisphere and for the earthquake in Haiti. Citing anonymous sources, it claimed that both events were caused by a sophisticated weather-controlling device called HAARP, used by the “empire” to weaken and defeat oppressed people around the world.
The daily went further, implying that the purpose of the quake was to enable the deployment of U.S. forces in Haiti, with the ultimate aim of plundering the country's oil reserves and using Haiti as a launching pad for invading nearby Cuba and Venezuela:
“The HAARP system,” says Kayhan, “is a weather weapon that discharges into the ionosphere an incredibly powerful energy beam that can cause climatic changes on specific sites, such as droughts, snowfalls, extreme cold, tsunamis, tornados, earthquakes and so forth. This weapon is controlled by the military and by powerful industrial groups…”
In recent years, Iranian anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric seems to have no limits, either in its ignorance or in its wilful intention to bend the truth: There is no relationship between weather and earthquakes.
Instead, what really exists at the HAARP project, based in Gakona, Alaska, is the ability to analyse the ionosphere and investigate the potential for enhancing technologies for radio communications and surveillance purposes, such as missile detection. It is not a system that can cause extensive snowfalls all over the United States, much less earthquakes.
The fact that the HAARP project is using a high power transmitter operating in the high frequency range, however, has unleashed the conspiracy-theorists of the world; as a result, Internet, websites with anti-American sentiments, especially on the HAARP issue, have mushroomed in assorted languages. Journalist Sharon Weinberger defined the HAARP project as the “Moby Dick of conspiracy theories,” adding that the popularity of these theories often overshadows the benefits that HAARP might actually provide to the scientific community.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in line with his friend, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and apparently unwilling to miss an opportunity to attack the U.S., said the Americans possess an experimental device that can cause shock waves and, besides earthquakes, can also cause floods, droughts, hurricanes and so on. It appears that from now on, we are authorised to blame “American imperialism” every time a natural catastrophe occurs, or even if it rains a bit more.
Sometimes comments like these assume overtones that are comic, such as the recent declarations about the earthquake in Haiti by actor (and Chavez supporter) Danny Glover: “What happened in Haiti could have happened in any other island of the Caribbean since these islands are in danger due to global warming. When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I'm saying?” in which we are asked to believe that an earthquake has been caused by the failure of a summit on climate change.
Even if many people undoubtedly hate Americans nowadays, it is amazing how their resentment finds an outlet in conspiracy theories that are untenable. 9/11? An American-Zionist plot aimed at justifying armed interventions in Muslim countries in order to plunder their wealth, oil in particular. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban? An American fabrication to create incidents that will once again justify the intervention of the “Imperial Power.”
Engagement?
Good luck.
