Tehran supports the Arab spring ... but not in Syria

Iran's regime has always been ready to compromise its principles – hence its hypocrisy over pro-democracy uprisings

Saeed Kamali Dehghan
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 April 2011
(Saeed Kamali Dehghan is an Iranian journalist)

"The wave of uprisings sweeping across the Middle East has prompted Iran to voice support for anti-dictatorship movements in the Arab region – except in Syria, an allied country where the Islamic republic has found itself in a very peculiar situation. When Tunisian and Egyptian protesters overthrew their dictators, many speculated that Iran would stay quiet, so as to avoid potential copycat activities at home. To the surprise of many observers, though, Iran reacted very publicly by supporting pro-democracy movements in the region while playing down any resemblance to unrest in Iran following the disputed presidential election of 2009.....

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even labelled the Arab uprising as "an Islamic awakening" inspired by Iran's 1979 revolution.....

In regard to Bahrain, Iran has rightly accused the US of supporting King Hamad, the despotic leader of a strategically important country that hosts the US Fifth Fleet, and has attacked it for staying silent towards Bahrain's brutal suppression of its popular uprising and the Saudi military intervention there. By highlighting US hypocrisy in dealing with the unrest in Bahrain and Yemen and the American failure to publicly condemn the violence used by both governments in suppressing their own people, Iran has won some recognition within the region. Yet Syria clearly exposes Iran's own hypocrisy. Iran has portrayed the Syrian pro-democracy demonstrators – unlike others in the Arab world – as "agitators" and "terrorists" hired by Israel to create disturbance and insecurity.Iranian state media, which initially ignored the unrest in Syria, later reported the broadcast of "confessions" of a group of "Syrian agitators" who appeared in front of the Syrian state-run television cameras....

Iran has always been ready to compromise its principles when that serves its purposes. In recent years Iran has found itself in a corner, with Syria as one of its few friends – leading the Iranian regime to portray Syria's largely secular government as an Islamic one. Thus, the measures taken by Syria in July 2010 to curb the use of the Muslim facial veil (and recently overturned) were not reported in Iran's state media at all. Iran's reaction to the recent events in the Middle East more than anything exposes the hypocrisy of an opportunistic regime that respects the human rights neither of its own people nor of those in its neighbourhood."