Israel, Iran, and Holocaust Denial

For many years, Gen. Qasem Soleimani had been one of Iran’s most important and influential military commanders, a top figure in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). He had played a central role in organizing the defeat of the radical Sunni ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq, and was also the architect of his country’s regional political strategy aimed at countering Israeli and American military power.

Therefore, his sudden assassination by an American drone-strike in early January 2020 sent shockwaves throughout the entire region. As I wrote at the time: THORNE Creatine - Micr... Check Amazon for Pricing.

The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.

Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.

The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.

Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America’s national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.

But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a terrorist organization,” drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.” Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal fig-leaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.

The Israelis and their American partisans had played a central role in persuading the Trump Administration to take that dramatic step, and it prompted me to write a very lengthy article discussing Israel’s heavy involvement in numerous assassinations over the decades.

• American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words

At the time of his death, Soleimani had spent more than twenty years as commander of the Quds Force, an especially elite unit within the IRGC reporting directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader and responsible for extraterritorial operations and unconventional warfare. Senior American officials had sometimes described that organization as a combination of America’s own CIA and its special forces military JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command.

After Soleimani’s death, he was succeeded by his longtime deputy Esmail Qaani, much less well known internationally but a forty-year veteran of the IRGC.

As the new head of the Quds Force, Qaani immediately became one of Iran’s most important military commanders. He stepped into the same role of coordinating Iranian support for its various regional allies, with the Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization being the most important among these. 5-Minute Core Exercise... Dzenitis, Tami Brehse Check Amazon for Pricing.

Then in September 2024, a series of massive Israeli airstrikes killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and a number of his top officials in their deep command bunker in Beirut. A New York Times article highlighted some unconfirmed reports in the Israeli and Arab media that Qaani might have been injured or killed in that same attack, along with other important Iranian IRGC officers.

Instead, Qaani survived uninjured. But a new and particularly shocking narrative soon emerged in Middle East Eye, a leading Western publication covering that region. We were told that Nasrallah’s assassination as well as the recent killing of many other top Hezbollah leaders had been facilitated by breaches in Iranian intelligence, with Qaani under arrest, suspected of having been working for Israel. This story was further amplified by an article in the Times of Israel, which quoted a Sky News Arabic report that during his interrogation Qaani had suffered a heart attack and had been hospitalized, with his chief of staff also under scrutiny as an Israeli agent. Saudi Arabian media even suggested that Qaani had been executed for collaborating with the Israeli Mossad.

If true, these reports surely represented one of the most devastating political blows that Iran had ever suffered. Suppose that at the height of the Cold War, our own CIA director had been arrested or even executed as a Soviet agent.

However, a few days later Iran held a funeral ceremony for one of the Quds Force generals killed in that recent Israeli attack, and Qaani appeared in public, uninjured, unarrested, unhospitalized, and very much alive. This led me to suspect that all those earlier media reports had probably been the product of Israeli disinformation efforts aimed at damaging the standing of Iran and one of its most important IRGC military commanders.

The following year, Israel used ongoing peace negotiations to launch a sudden surprise attack against Iran, successfully assassinating many important Iranian figures. These included some of the country’s top military commanders and leading nuclear scientists and the resulting June 2025 conflict became known as the Iran-Israel Twelve Day War. The New York Times initially reported Qaani’s death, though it later amended the story to explain that he had survived, as was demonstrated by Tehran video footage of his activities.

Then on February 28 of this year, America and Israel again used the ruse of peace negotiations to suddenly attack Iran, initiating the conflict with a huge wave of decapitating missile strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and many of his country’s top political and military commanders. Once again, numerous media outlets claimed that Qaani was a traitor who had facilitated those attacks against his own country, and some of these stories reported that he had been executed by his own Iranian government. This shocking development was even covered by the English language news service of France’s official state broadcaster France 24.

Video Link

I remember being surprised that the report of Qaani’s treason was casually accepted and passed along by one or two of the alt-media podcasters whom I regularly followed, individuals who were otherwise extremely skeptical of any claims about the Middle East made by Western media outlets.

However, this time I was far more cautious in swallowing such stories. I also noticed that despite Qaani’s very prominent position in his country’s military hierarchy, he was never included in any of the charts that the Times published showing Iran’s important political and military leaders, both dead and surviving.

My caution soon proved warranted as Qaani began regularly issuing various public statements regarding Iran’s military efforts, and these have continued during the weeks that followed. For example, just a few days ago he threatened further escalation in the conflict and demanded Israel’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon. Rather than having been arrested and executed, there seemed not the slightest evidence that the Iranian government had ever suspected Qaani of any disloyalty. Vital Proteins Collage... Check Amazon for Pricing.

Those earlier media reports implicating Qaani had heavily emphasized that he had not recently been seen in public, but this was hardly surprising given the continuing Israeli and American efforts to assassinate top Iranian military and political leaders. Indeed I suspected that those stories about Qaani’s alleged execution had been deliberately circulated to provoke him into taking unwise actions that would better allow him to be targeted and killed.

Doubtful media reports also recently circulated regarding another very prominent Iranian leader.

The wave of airstrikes that began the current Iran war killed the 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at his residential compound in Tehran, also taking the lives of many of his family members, including a daughter, grand-daughter, son-in-law, and daughter-in-law, though contrary to initial reports his wife had survived.

Among the injured survivors was Khamenei’s second eldest son Mojtaba, and just over a week later the Iranian Council of Experts elected the latter as the new Supreme Leader in his father’s place.

Under normal circumstances such a dynastic succession might have been viewed with extreme disfavor by the leadership of the Islamic Republic, and indeed in the past both the elder and younger Khameneis had expressed their strong opposition to hereditary rule. But that factor may have been overcome by the perceived importance of demonstrating defiant national resolve and political continuity in the face of the killings of so many senior Iranian leaders and the martyrdom of numerous Khamenei family members.

After the younger Khamenei had been installed as Iran’s third Supreme Leader, the Israelis and the Americans marked him for death, so for obvious reasons he avoided appearing in public or otherwise revealing his location. However, unsubstantiated media reports soon began circulating in Western outlets that provided other explanations for his reticence. According to some of these, the attack that killed his father had left him severely injured and incapacitated, crippled or disfigured. Or he was in a coma, or had fled the country, or was even already dead.

During this period, Israel’s assassinations still continued, claiming the life of Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and often considered Iran’s most important political leader, as well as many additional top military commanders. So these stories about Mojtaba may have been intended to lure him into the open, allowing his elimination. The Israelis may have hoped that killing two Supreme Leaders in rapid succession would break the spirit of the Islamic Republic. THORNE Creatine - Micr... Check Amazon for Pricing.

A few weeks earlier, a Bloomberg investigation had allegedly revealed that Mojtaba Khamenei owned “a global property empire” of “sprawling international investments,” including British luxury properties worth some $138 million. These stories were widely circulated but I viewed them with great skepticism since it was unclear to me how an Islamic cleric subject to severe Western financial sanctions and living in Iran could possibility benefit from his ownership of luxurious British mansions.

Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Iran, with sodomy sometimes punished by death. But a few days after Mojtaba’s elevation, the bitterly hostile New York Post claimed that American intelligence had determined that Iran’s new Supreme Leader was probably gay. The same article blandly mentioned the death of his wife and teenage son in the airstrike that had killed his father, while also noting that he had two other surviving children.

It was certainly possible that the Islamic Republic’s highest ranking Shiite cleric was actually a gay sybarite who eagerly acquired British mansions that he could never visit, let alone use as a residence. But dishonest propaganda is a staple of all military conflicts, and these days the American government and its Israeli mentors are especially shameless in that regard. So one must obviously maintain considerable skepticism towards such lurid stories, which actually very much seem a projection of the scandalous behavior of the West’s own top elites, now increasingly called “the Epstein class.”

Read the Whole Article

Vital Proteins Collage... Check Amazon for Pricing. Sports Researchu00ae O... Check Amazon for Pricing. Nordic Naturals Ultima... Buy New $32.49 ($0.36 / Count) (as of 04:49 UTC - Details) Sports Researchu00ae V... Check Amazon for Pricing.

The Best of Ron Unz