Iran's presence in the Middle East as an independent force poses a threat to the US and Israel's freedom to do whatever they want, said Penn State University professor in an interview to IRNA.
Jennifer Loewenstein, a human rights activist and faculty associate in Middle East Studies at Penn State University, discussed some issues in her interview focusing mainly on the US foreign policy and in particular Trump's and said, 'I cannot say that in the last fifty years, (or even) longer than that, there has been a good foreign policy coming out of the US.'
'Donald Trump’s foreign policy is terrible,' she went on to say.
Regarding the imposition of new sanctions against Iran in the Congress, Loewenstein said, 'Bernie Sanders is probably the only person in the Congress that would ever get my vote. He is a very outspoken person and compared to the rest of the Congress … in general Bernie Sanders is a maverick; he is unique and I think he really would have done something good for this country had he been elected, but that was not going to happen.'
'The Democratic Party was determined to keep him out and to make Hillary Clinton their candidate and I think by doing so they gave the election to Donald Trump. Maybe Sanders actually does not understand the foreign policy that well but he is sensible enough to know that military confrontation with Iran would be devastating… so it is the last thing we should want,' she stressed.
Loewenstein tried to come up with a hypothesis about why the US is focusing on Iran and imposing sanctions against this country.
'And now Iran is the target because Iran represents an independent force in the Middle East and is not beholding to the US nor to Russia and that is very threatening to countries like the US and Israel which would like to be at liberty to do whatever they want in the region and Iran poses a threat to that,' she said.
She also added that the way the US, as a major power, is representing the country to the world is shameful and said there is need for the whole world to stand against what the US is doing.
'I wish it would isolate the US because we are making a terrible example of ourselves globally and I think other powers need to join together and unite against what we are doing,' she said.
'…but with Israel and Great Britain as exceptions and maybe Saudi Arabia, too; I think the rest of the world is fairly united and opposing what Donald Trump stands for,' she added.
'Pro-Israel lobby has been hard at work to lobby Congress people, government bodies and whatever that supports breaking the agreement,' she said with regard to Iran's historic nuclear agreement with P5+1 and the European Union.
'I do not know enough about big corporations to know that one or any of them would benefit from sanctions and it seems the opposite would be true,' Loewenstein said.
'Donald Trump, by voting for more sanctions, I cannot imagine how that is going to benefit anyone and in fact it is dangerous because he is a reckless man who knows very little about the world,' she added.
'Over the last thirty years, there has been a major shift to the right, there is no question of that. The Republican Party is dangerous and the Democratic Party is not much better and it does not surprise me that Washington and the political institutions there in general reflect the people in the Supreme Court, people in Congress, the people at the White House, the people in the Cabinet,' she said.
She made the remarks about the change in the American policy and particularly its foreign policy and the consonance of the American institutions with that.
'We are the only major power on the planet that refuses to confront global warming …. That is a really dangerous way of going forward with our future and the same is true about Iran,' she said.
'I see the Trump’s administration as simply an extension of American foreign policy insofar as they want to have a sole power in the Middle East and does not want any opposition, but Iran’s influence is growing and that is perceived as a threat and so Trump and his supporters in Washington and elsewhere and certainly in Israel and among the lobbies like AIPAC, they are going to go out of their way to make Iran an enemy,' she stressed.
'It is crazy to me listen to Donald Trump or anyone who supports him that says Iran is the leading exporter of terror in the region. How can anybody who has been paying any attention to the news over the past six years come to that conclusion with ISIS going across the Middle East and getting funding from some of the Gulf States and certainly and initially from Saudi Arabia, Iran is the number one sponsor of terror?! Who are they kidding? Even somebody with very little education knows about ISIS, knows what it has done and is doing,' she said.
The professor, calling all these accusations laughable, pointed out that 'ISIS is the anti thesis of Iran, everything Iran does not stand for and I do not think ISIS represents Islam in general. It is a great terror organization.'
'Iran has been on our side fighting with ISIS,' she stressed.
She also explained about the US policy toward Saudi Arabia and the country's double standards toward terrorism.
'There is obviously something very wrong with our politicians,' she said.
'There is a political and military agenda, first of all Trump is essentially a businessman and he sold to this body something like a $110 billion an arms recently and that is really great for Saudi Arabia and it is really great for the US and it will allow Saudi Arabia to continue its slaughter in Yemen, it is an absolute slaughter of people, destroying the entire country, so we are promoting that by selling the Saudis weapons and the same goes where further the Persian Gulf countries could buy US-made weapons,' she stressed.
Loewenstein called Saudi Arabia 'a fanatically hypocritical nation' due to its support of ISIS in its early stages and their people joining the terrorist group.
'We go out of our way and so do the Saudi propaganda institutions in this country to cover up what Saudi Arabia represents. The Shia community in Saudi Arabia has been treated terribly; the discrimination against them has been awful for decades. People thrown in prison, people executed for absolutely no crime whatsoever for being Shia basically,' she said.
The Professor said that the 'US's silence' toward these things 'is nothing new' and 'the Trump’s administration is trying to distract the American public from what really matters at home by stirring up another kind of media controversy, the same way is doing with Russia, and taking the focus of what really is happening internally in the US.'
She also pointed out that the Saudis have propaganda institutions in the US and according to a recent report, 'Saudi propaganda institutions here in the US are actually getting information from the Israeli institutions on how to conduct good propaganda. The difference is that the Israeli lobby focuses on the general population where the Saudi lobby focuses on the specific institutions of government.'
'The Saudi lobby does not really want or need public support among the Americans; it needs institutional support, political support by the administration. Recently in this conflict with Qatar, Saudis put a whole ad in the newspapers about Qatar being the number one sponsor of terror and Qataris counteracted that but the whole thing is laughable and if it is not ironic I do not know what that is,' she said.
'According to an article I read recently, the Saudi propaganda is aimed at influencing people in politics in Washing DC, to make them support Saudis policies,' she pointed out.
(IRNA)
