Real News Network: How Do Iranians React To Threat of Attack?
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 7, 2008
12:02 PM
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CONTACT: The Real News Network
Nina Aghdasi, 416-916-5202
Email: smcommunications@therealnews.com |
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How Do Iranians React To Threat of Attack?
Trita Parsi Talks About The Effect of Threats on Iranian Public Opinion
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- July 7 - The latest report by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker confirmed that the US is involved in counterinsurgency and black ops inside Iranian territory. The report came out just weeks after the AIPAC policy conference, where presidential hopeful John McCain told crowds that a nuclear-armed Iran is a danger we cannot allow and that Iran poses an existential threat to the state of Israel, underlining his camp's demonizing of Iran.
Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, says this is the continuation of a failed policy which has "imposed a significant cost on the Iranian people", but not translated into a change in the policies of the Iranian government. According to Parsi, sanctions have the most influence in the context of a negotiation, and McCain has made it clear – he will never go to the table.
His Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama, has emphasized the need for negotiations, and has sparked the interest of the Jewish-American community and Iranians alike. Sixty-two percent of the Jewish-American community supports Obama, according to some polls. In Tehran, "there is a mystery that the next president of the United States may not only be African-American, but may also have a Muslim father and a Hussein as his middle name." Parsi tells The Real News Network's Pepe Escobar, "That actually can give the United States significant political capital that it can again utilize in the Middle East, but only in the context of negotiations."
The consensus among the Iranian-American community, much like the majority of the American population, Parsi says, is "that war would have tremendously negative consequences, and that it would be un-American to even vote for a military solution prior to having exhausted all other options."
To hear more, watch the full interview on The Real News Network: How Do Iranians React To Threat of Attack?
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