By John Allen Gay
nationalinterest.org
11-19-13
It’s getting harder to be a hardliner in Iran. President Hassan Rouhani is making overtures to the West, and while he’s hardly revolutionized government—executions continue apace, for instance—his nuclear negotiating team is meeting with the United States and its allies. Perhaps an interim nuclear agreement will be concluded this week in Geneva. And some are even questioning whether the “Death to America” slogan should be retired.
All this has the Islamic Revolution’s most committed loyalists quite worried, and they’ve been working overtime to pressure the new administration to back away from the United States. That’s why, earlier this month, they held a big rally at the former U.S. embassy in Tehran to commemorate the thirty-fourth anniversary of its 1979 takeover. There were chants, burning effigies, burning American and Israeli flags, posters of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, bored dignitaries, and lots of banners and fun headbands. A nice anti-American outing for the whole family—bring your grandma, bring your kids! And, par for the course when hardliners gather, there were insinuations of a sinister American-Israeli-Nazi alliance. Several attendees carried signs, apparently professionally designed and printed, depicting a Star of David with a Swastika inside it. [See above].
. . . Look closely at that logo—does it look familiar? If you have an interest in oddball religions or in cloning, it should—it’s an old symbol of the Raëlians, a UFO cult that shot to international notoriety after their 2002 claim that they’d successfully cloned a human being. . . .
