TEL AVIV – A video of 50 IDF soldiers in uniform singing a well-known love song in Persian has gone viral on Iranian social media.
The soldiers, a group of cadets from IDF intelligence who are learning to speak Farsi, were singing “Sultan of Hearts” during a ceremony at an army base, Channel 10 news reported.
The lyrics include the lines “With beautiful love, the world is very small. I’m with the memory of you everywhere, everywhere, so I don’t abandon you.”
The singing was filmed by a father in attendance and uploaded without permission from the IDF.
A spokesperson for the IDF said, “The video was filmed at a private ceremony. One of the soldiers’ parents who attended the ceremony innocently posted the video, contravening information security regulations. When asked, he immediately removed the video.”
However, the footage has already gone viral.
Iranian Twitter users reacted with opposing views to the video. While some saw it as concrete evidence of the strength of Israeli intelligence, and what calamities will befall the Islamic Republic as a result of that, many saw it as a peaceful move.
The video emerged on social media in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation exposing a massive Israeli Mossad operation to smuggle information on Iran’s nuclear weapons program into Israel.
Harold Rhode, a former Pentagon official and Iran expert, last week said the revelation caused Tehran to “quake in its boots.”
According to 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.
Rhode, 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.”
The country has been embroiled in protests against the regime in almost every city.
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.”