The instructor of Zionists in espionage, terror, sabotage is Satan, “this is their millennia-old profession,” a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says.
Gen. Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, speaking Sunday to Fars news agency controlled by the IRGC, made the anti-Semitic remark amid a torrent of daily attacks by Islamic Republic officials against Israel.
The renewed rhetoric began just a few weeks after Iran concluded an agreement with Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations and according to Israeli officials, instigated attacks by Palestinians in early April.
Naghdi, who is a deputy to IRGC's chief commander, went on to say that while Satan guides the Zionists, Iran’s regime “is led by saints” and its mission is to inspire light in the hearts of men. “Some have been awakened” and even voluntarily provide top-secret information to the Islamic Republic.
“Sometimes they are shocked how the Iranians found a particular secret,” he said. “They search and search again for a spy and cannot find one, unbeknownst to them that many of their personnel are cooperating out of conviction.”
Naghdi, like many other IRGC officers, is adept at propaganda, having been raised in a religious milieu where fantastic stories are told and told again to build faith in the Shiite ideology. However, faced with multiple crises regime officials seem to have resorted more intensely to twisting reality to justify their policies or deflect criticism.
Recently, a leaked audio recording showed how an intelligence official used bizarre and conspiratorial statements in a speech to try to explain away multiple problems the regime faces.
In fact, since July 2020, evidence has piled up that Israel has deeply penetrated Iran’s security barriers and has succeeded in major sabotage operations against nuclear and military targets. The regime in Tehran and particularly the IRGC have lost face after telling the people for four decades that they are very strong in security and military spheres.
Their myth shattered, their failures in the economic sphere now loom even larger. The economy is in tatters and tens of millions of Iranians have sunk into poverty. Last year, the regime faced the most intense protests in its four-decade history, and large-scale unrest can resume at any moment.
Naghdi claimed that last year 10,000 attacks took place against Israel, taking credit for standing behind what the regime calls “the resistance front.”
“This is the revenge of the Islamic Revolution; the destruction of the Zionist regime,” he said.
Naghdi also echoed statements by other senior officials in the past few days that Israel’s power of deterrence has been broken and not only it is unable to intimidate Iran, but also it can no longer deter the Hezbollah and Palestinian militants.
He also claimed that the Islamic Republic has almost driven out the United States from the region, highlighting the US defeat in Afghanistan and the hasty withdrawal.
“They escaped from Afghanistan and most of them also escaped from Iraq and the rest will also leave. They have been defeated, and this trend will continue,” Naghdi claimed. He also mocked the US and Britain for not being able to do anything when their servicemen were detained by the Revolutionary Guard, in 2016 and 2007 respectively.
Claiming that people throughout the world follow the ideology of Iran’s regime, Naghdi asked, “In which era in history we, or any other country, had such an influence? I have estimated that daily 100,000 experts wake up, go to work, get paid in different countries just to overthrow the Islamic Republic regime…”