Wednesday, August 26, 2020

How can a plonker like Pompeo know anything about the Ayatollahs?

By Kevin Barrett
Iran's Foreign Minister Zarif has said that the Trump administration has once again disgraced itself by going to the United Nations and trying to trigger the snapback provisions of the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran that the US actually left. And the entire world is laughing at the United States and at Trump and Pompeo for their grotesquely irrational attempt to say that the US can trigger snapback because it's somehow still in the deal, even though Trump made such a huge show of leaving the deal shortly after he assumed office.
So, Trump and Pompeo say "we're in the deal, even though we're out of the deal." And the whole world is having none of it. And so Pompeo is crying and throwing a tantrum claiming that the entire world is siding with “the Ayatollahs.”
Well, maybe that's true. And maybe that's because the "Ayatollahs" are obviously right about this. The Ayatollah is the highest level of the Shia clergy in Iran. They are very well educated. Even people who don't come anywhere near reaching the level of Ayatollah are vastly better educated than people like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.
Anybody who goes through the elementary religious scholarship training in Iran, even at the elementary level, gets very rigorous classical education based on the classical Greek trivium with logic, and rhetoric, and public speaking and then on to higher levels.
So the Ayatollahs are some of the best-educated people in the entire world. People who didn't know that should read the book Mantle of the Prophet by Roy Mottahedeh, one of the very best and most influential books in English on the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
So, you don't really have to be at the level of an Ayatollah - at the level of the best classically educated people in the entire world - to know that based on elementary logic, you can't be in the deal if you left the deal and you're out of the deal. But apparently people like Trump and Pompeo don't understand that.
And frankly, Pompeo is a pathetic representative of the educational level and the intellectual level of American Christians. There are some very bright and very brilliant American Christians, of course, people like... the Process School of Theology led by people like John Cobb and David Ray Griffin. But the right-wing Zionist Christians, by and large, are a bunch of grade schools flunk-outs. Even their so-called universities are a joke. And their leaders like Mike Pompeo—he couldn't get out of kindergarten in the Iranian religious scholarship training.
And maybe that's why he's trying to force this blatantly irrational position on the entire world. And then when the world laughs him out of the United Nations, he rolls on the ground and beats the ground with his fists and cries and has a temper tantrum.
The United States is becoming more and more of an international embarrassment. And whatever happens in the next election, it's going to take a long time for us to recover what reputation we previously had in the world. As an American, I'm embarrassed to have people like Trump and Pompeo representing me. And frankly, I'll be happy to admit any day of the week that the Ayatollahs are vastly more qualified to use elementary logic and to make decisions, including political decisions, than idiots like Pompeo.
Kevin Barrett is an American author, journalist and radio host with a Ph.D. in Islamic and Arabic Studies. He has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003. He recorded this article for Press TV website.

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