TEHRAN – Iran on Saturday revelled in US discomfiture at the loss of veteran ally Hosni Mubarak and pointedly ignored parallels, bluntly drawn by Washington, between the protest movements in Cairo and Tehran.
Iranian officials trumpeted the fact that the veteran Egyptian strongman’s shock resignation after 18 straight days of protests came on February 11 — the same day as the 1979 Islamic revolution which overthrew the US-backed shah. And disregarding US accusations of “hypocrisy” in the face of their own crackdown on mass protests in 2009, officials warned Western-backed autocrats across the Arab world that their peoples would bring them down too.
“The coincidence of Mubarak’s fall with the triumph of the Islamic revolution shows that the 22nd Bahman (February 11) is a day of victory for nations of the region and it is the day of defeat for America and Zionism in the region,” said Supreme National Security Council secretary Saeed Jalili.
“Mubarak and his American and European backers heard the voice of the Egyptian people 30 years too late. America and Europe should answer why they supported dictatorship for 30 years,” added Jalili, who is also Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, in comments carried by the ISNA news agency. The speaker of Iran’s conservative parliament, Ali Larijani, said the fall of Mubarak and Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in the space of a month was a wake-up call for Western-backed leaders around the Arab world.
“The events in Tunisia and Egypt are an alarm bell for despotic leaders who for years trampled their people and ignored their real demands only to preserve their own interests,” Larijani said. Former Iranian president and influential cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani stressed that Mubarak’s fall was the “biggest blow” to Israel. “The fall of Egypt’s dictator on 22nd Bahman is auspicious for the region… The Zionist regime has received a powerful blow and is the biggest loser of this wave of awakening,” said Rafsanjani, who in recent months is inching close to the regime again after backing the opposition in the 2009 presidential poll.
Iranian officials were unabashed in their trumpeting of the people power overthrow of Mubarak despite US charges of hypocrisy given the tight grip they have kept on demonstrations since the wave of protests that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election in June 2009.
