West fails to distract Islamic Awakening movement: Lawmaker

An Iranian lawmaker says the spreading wave of the Islamic awakening continues to sweep the entire region despite the West’s attempts to deflect the religious movement.

“Following the start of the Islamic Awakening, the West saw its interests in the region endangered and tried its best to abort the movement,” Ebrahim Aqa-Mohammadi, a member of Iran Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said on Sunday.

“However, it failed to prevent Muslim nations from achieving their goal of toppling non-Islamic, pro-Western governments in the region,” he added.

Aqa-Mohammadi said the West’s failure in halting the wave of the Islamic Awakening in the Middle East prompted it to resort to a new ploy in order to divert the movement from its original goal of fighting global arrogance and Israel.

“The West, in order to deflect the Islamic Awakening movement, presented counterfeit, artificial and Western models of the Islamic Awakening and used ‘the Arab Spring’ to name this movement,” he stated.

In January 2011, Tunisia saw the overthrow of long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in a popular revolution, which was followed by the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in February 2011.

Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi was also toppled and killed in October 2011, after months of war between armed revolutionaries and his loyalists, while in Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh narrowly escaped prosecution over the killing of hundreds of protesters.

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have also been the scene of street protests and rallies against their totalitarian rulers, who have been enforcing heavy-handed crackdown on peaceful protests.