Senior Iranian cleric hails MENA revolutionaries

A senior Iranian cleric has hailed the resistance of Muslim revolutionaries against their foreign-backed rulers and slammed the West’s disregard for human rights.

“Bravo to the insight of Egyptians, who do not value preserving their revolution less than the revolution itself,” Tehran’s interim Friday Prayers leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Khatami, IRNA reported.

The cleric was referring to the continued protest rallies in post-revolution Egypt, where people are pressing the country’s ruling junta to meet the demands for which they overthrew the country’s longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in mid-February.

“The people of Egypt say that those who committed crime in Hosni Mubarak’s regime must be removed from power and tried,” he pointed out.

He described the Egyptians’ demand as a “logical” one, and praised the anti-Israeli stance adopted by revolutionaries in Egypt.

The cleric also addressed the ongoing Saudi-backed crackdowns on anti-regime protesters in Bahrain. He condemned the country’s ruling family for resorting to “bullets, repression and torture” to silence protesters trying to assert their right to build their country’s future through free elections.

Ayatollah Khatami also admired the months-long resistance of Yemeni revolutionaries against the brutal suppression of forces loyal to the country’s US and Saudi-backed dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The cleric criticized international human rights organizations for their inaction towards a July 19 attack by Israeli naval forces on an aid vessel en route to the blockaded Gaza Strip, and condemned their silence on the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza.

“It has been four whole years since the Gaza [Strip] was blockaded and while [Gazans] having a pressing need for food and medicine, international organizations are not breathing a word [about the matter],” he added.

“The current international bodies have lost efficiency due to their dependence on [world] powers,” he noted, calling for the formation of new independent organizations.

Ayatollah Khatami condemned the violation of human rights in Britain, referring to the country’s growing phone hacking scandal and the murder of a whistleblower who disclosed the illegal activities of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

“It so appears that murder has turned into an institutionalized standard for Britons,” he scoffed.

The cleric then lashed out at the killing of a black man for not paying the bus fare in the United States as a further proof of US disregard for human rights and their “instrumental manipulation” of this concept in order to deceive the world.