TEL AVIV – Tehran is “quaking in its boots” following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s exposé revealing the regime’s nuclear weapons program, a former Pentagon official told the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
According to Iran expert Harold Rhode, Israel “humiliated the Iranian government by capturing all of this material” and across social media Iranians are making fun of the regime.
Rhode, who worked for close to three decades at the Pentagon, said a wave of infighting in the Islamic Republic since the infiltration attests to the country’s vulnerability. When things are not going well for the ruling ayatollahs, Rhode added, rival ayatollahs and officials within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps publicly attack each other. Senior Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi-Amoli has recently been slamming his rivals, blaming their corruption for bringing down the regime.
The former Pentagon official, who is fluent in Farsi and studied in Iran before the revolution in 1979, said that the Mossad operation “proves what they think of Jews — that they are the smartest people on earth and can do anything.”
Rhode related a personal anecdote describing what he used to tell Iranian friends when he lived in the country: “There was a Jewish technology of tiny little zippers between our foreheads and hairlines to send messages to conspiracy central where the … ‘Elders of Zion’ collected everything. They believed this was how things really worked.”
The country has been embroiled in protests against the regime in almost every city.
Last week, a dead body was unearthed that Iranians have said was likely that of former Iranian ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi. According to Rhode, Iranians, who by and large have superstitious tendencies, have questioned whether the discovery of the body — which was hidden since the revolution — is an omen indicating that the rule of the ayatollahs over the last several decades has been a colossal mistake.
Rhode said the average Iranian “would like nothing more than to wake up and have this nightmare regime over with and again proudly be accepted as members of the international community.”
Now is the time, he continued, “to reassure the Iranian people that we stand with them against their brutal rulers” and tell the Iranian people that “after their terrorist regime is overthrown, we will gladly welcome them back into the community of nations.”