Now we’ve gone and hurt their feelings. As Rick Moran detailed Friday, the U.S. government has charged three men, including one Iranian, with plotting to assassinate Donald Trump at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), in revenge for the 2020 killing of IRGC top dog Qasem Soleimani. The Iranians, however, are hotly denying this, claiming that it’s a malicious invention of the Biden-Harris Justice Department. And when it’s a choice between the Iranian mullahs and the regime’s gang of authoritarian prevaricators at the “Justice” department, who are you gonna believe?

Fox News reported Saturday that “Iran’s Foreign Ministry dismissed a report released by the Department of Justice on Friday stating that it thwarted an Iranian plot to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump.” A spokesman for the foreign ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, “categorically dismissed allegations that Iran was involved in attempts to assassinate former and current US officials.” Baghaei thundered that the Justice Department’s report was “completely baseless and rejected,” and even claimed that similar allegations in the past have likewise been “firmly denied and proven false.”

Who does Baghaei think is behind all this lying? Why, the Jews, of course. He said that the American claims of an Iranian assassination plot against Trump were ” a malicious conspiracy orchestrated by Zionist and anti-Iranian circles, aimed at further complicating the issues between the US and Iran.” He assured the world that the Islamic Republic of Iran “remains committed” to using “all legitimate and legal means” to “restore the rights of the Iranian nation.” What rights has the Iranian nation lost? Baghaei didn’t get into that, and with good reason, since the only beef the Iranian regime really has with Israel is that it’s a Jewish state. Israel has never impinged upon Iran’s rights or threatened it in any way.

Trust in the U.S. government is so low these days that Baghaei’s claims found at least one notable taker. Political commentator and “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams said: “I hate to say it, but I believe Iran over the United States on this topic. It would have been stupid for Iran to be behind it. It is normal for the United States to blame the wrong people.”

Adams may not be aware, however, that while the Iranians are denying it now, but they’ve admitted in the past that they were trying to kill Trump. In Feb. 2023, Fox News reported that Iran had renewed its threats against Trump and the others, and even stated them in Islamic religious terms. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace force, declared: “God willing, we are looking to kill Trump [and] Pompeo… and military commanders who issued the order should be killed.”

Even before that, Iran’s state-controlled Ahlul Bayt News Agency reported on Jan. 23, 2021, that the Supreme Leader’s official website “posted a photo-montage of former US President Donald Trump playing golf under the shadow of a drone, vowing to avenge the assassination of Iran’s Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani.”

Khamenei also said in Dec. 2020: “Revenge is certain.” He added: “The assassin of Soleimani and the one who ordered the murder should be punished. As an esteemed person said, Soleimani’s shoe is worth more than the assassin’s head and even decapitation of the assassin will not compensate for Soleimani’s shoe; but they did the wrong thing. They should be punished. The one who ordered and the assassin should know that they should be punished at any time possible.”

Trump was a favored Khamenei target even before Soleimani was killed. In Feb. 2019, the Supreme Leader declared to a military gathering that “as long as America continues its wickedness, the Iranian nation will not abandon ‘Death to America.’ ‘Death to America’ means death to Trump, John Bolton, and Pompeo. It means death to American rulers.”

So is the Islamic Republic lying now? That shouldn’t come as a surprise. As The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran explains, the Islamic concept of taqiyya, lying to deceive one’s enemies, was formulated during the time of the sixth Shi’ite Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, in the middle of the eighth century, when the Shi’ites were being persecuted by the Sunni caliph al-Mansur. Taqiyya allowed Shi’ites to pretend to be Sunnis in order to protect themselves from Sunnis who were killing Shi’ites. Until the conversion of Persia to Shi’ism, taqiyya was an important element of Shi’ite survival. Sunnis, in the majority almost everywhere, would not infrequently take it upon themselves to cleanse the land of those whom they referred to as Rafidites, or rejecters: those who rejected the caliphates of Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman, the first three successors of Muhammad, all of whom were chosen over the man Shia believe Muhammad chose for the job, Ali Ibn Abi Talib.

Nowadays, of course, it’s bad form even to consider the possibility that one’s adversary might be attempting to deceive. But is it really so farfetched when it’s a cornerstone of the theology that is the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Image - Reuters