Iran only voice supporting Palestinians: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Foad Izadi, a professor at the University of Tehran, to discuss remarks made by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei during Eid al-Fitr prayers in the capital Tehran.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: Can you tell us the significance of the holy month of Ramadan ending in Eid al-Fitr?  

Izadi: Well first of all I need to say happy Eid or Eid Mubarak to all the viewers. What we have in the Muslim calendar are just a few eids. Eid al-Fitr is one of the major eids or major religious holidays of the Muslim calendar. It comes at the end of 30 days of fasting or 29 days of fasting, depending on the month, and it is one of the most significant occasions in the Islamic calendar.

What you saw on television in Tehran is obviously about a million people attending the prayer that was led by Ayatollah Khamenei but your viewers probably know that this is just one place that the prayers are held. Throughout Tehran at basically ever mosque you have eid prayers. So some people choose to go to their local mosque and a lot of people choose to come to the main prayer event in Tehran.

So it is needless to say millions upon millions of people attend this ceremony. It has religious significance and also it has a political significance. The fact that whenever you listen to Western media outlets, they generally talk about people in Iran wanting to run away from religion or fight the Islamic government or a lot of times you hear Iranian youths do not like the political system that exists in the country. If someone is fair, just looking at these pictures, looking at the many young people that come and attend these prayers, this is just a signal to these corporate media outlets to basically follow the facts when they cover stories and it has, as I said, a political dimension that should not be forgotten.

Press TV: And Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei also in his Eid al-Fitr speech, he actually addressed the terrorists as followers of fake Islam and he said they are nurtured by the US Zionists and UK and blasted them for carrying out so many deadly terrorist attacks during the holy month of Ramadan. Your thoughts on this comment.

Izadi: Well the fact that they are fake was proven again a couple of days ago. What type of a Muslim would bomb the city of the Prophet, Medina, that is one of the two major cities of all Muslims? They respect it, it is where the Prophet of Islam is buried, Muslims do not bomb their Prophet’s burial site, no one does that. So they are fake. That is one point.

And when you look at the history of the Syrian conflict and the Iraqi conflict, you realize that these groups could not flourish without the help of the United States and its regional allies. In fact that help has not stopped. These terrorist organizations need money, they need weapon and for the last many years the United States' government and the Saudi government and a number of other countries in this part of the world pay cash and weapons to whoever is fighting the Syrian government and the result is spread of terrorism, so that the fact that the United States and its allies are supporting terrorism is very much known to people who live in this part of the world.

Press TV: And the Leader also said the Palestinian cause is an Islamic cause, it belongs to the entire Muslim Ummah and he blasted certain Arab countries that do not support Palestinians and are more on Zionist agenda than the Palestinians. Can you give us your take on that?

Izadi: We have a very strange situation. In the last couple of years we have a number of governments in the Arab world, the Saudi government, the Qatari government and in the recent weeks even the Turkish government announcing that they want to have normal relations with the Israelis. The government of the Zionists are the people who are killing Palestinians, imprisoning Palestinians on a daily basis. They have occupied Palestine for many decades and the fact that the Saudi government considers the Israeli government to be a friend and they consider Iran to be the enemy shows how far they have gone away from the intelligent path of conducting foreign policy.

And so Iran unfortunately is the only voice that is supporting the Palestinian cause in the Muslim world, Iran as a country and of course a lot of people from different nationalities all over the Muslim world but in terms of a government it is actually supporting not only just by words but also providing weapons to Palestinian fighters is the Islamic Republic of Iran, that is a point of pride for the people of Iran and if anybody had any doubts about that, looking at the al-Quds demonstrations just last week shows that the cause of Palestine is alive and well in the Islamic Republic. 

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