Juno News - June 04, 2020


Iran’s deadly coronavirus lies


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

147.47949

Word Count

3,224

Sentence Count

134


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:10.320 You know, all around the world, people are talking about the coronavirus pandemic,
00:00:14.860 the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fact that the worst is behind us.
00:00:18.800 People are talking about reopening the economy, getting back to normal as best as possible.
00:00:24.220 Yet there's a story that hasn't really been told in the mainstream media here,
00:00:27.960 and that's that in the country of Iran, the deaths continue to mount.
00:00:32.360 A new report from the National Council of Resistance of Iran will today suggest that
00:00:38.780 around 50,000 people, 50,000 people have lost their lives in Iran to COVID-19.
00:00:45.300 Now, that's horrific on the surface, but also even more so when you take into account
00:00:50.160 how vastly different that number is from Iran's official tally, which is just a fraction of that.
00:00:56.900 I want to speak about this with Ali Safavi, an official with the National Council of
00:01:01.540 Resistance of Iran, who joins me on the line now.
00:01:05.040 Ali, thank you so much for coming on today.
00:01:06.880 Great speaking with you.
00:01:08.360 Thank you very much, Andrew, and thanks for having me on the show.
00:01:10.980 Looking forward to it.
00:01:12.000 Let's talk about the real issue here, I think, which is why is there such a gap between the
00:01:18.860 official numbers of Iran and the numbers that your group, NCRI, has been able to come out with?
00:01:24.660 Well, as you might imagine, of course, lies, deception, and cover-up are part of this
00:01:31.760 urgent DNA, and the issue is not only regarding the fatalities figure, but even as to when this
00:01:41.300 coronavirus has spread to Iran, the Iranian officials, out of political expediency, to ensure
00:01:49.620 that there is a large participation in the anniversary of their coming to power and also the
00:01:56.220 sham parliamentary elections, they did not inform the Iranian public about the coronavirus
00:02:03.400 having spread to Iran.
00:02:05.480 In fact, they delayed it for about a month, which, of course, resulted in many people being
00:02:10.220 infected with it, and so for them, if they basically tell the Iranian public that the casualty
00:02:18.520 figure is getting close to 50,000, that, of course, would have tremendous internal backlash.
00:02:24.860 It would also have tremendous international backlash.
00:02:27.900 In a sense, Iran probably would be the second or the third country with a number of fatalities,
00:02:33.280 and so in this sense, they do this because, of course, they don't want the Iranian people
00:02:38.260 to know the extent of their mismanagement, their incompetence, and, of course, the fact
00:02:44.940 that they have not allocated the kind of resources that they have to addressing this problem in
00:02:53.360 the country.
00:02:53.840 Now, as the name of your organization suggests, Resistance, you are not representative of the
00:03:00.220 Iranian regime, not an organ of the Iranian government.
00:03:03.260 How does your organization get access to these figures if there is such, as you know, a dishonesty
00:03:09.800 and duplicity coming from the regime and the figures that they make available?
00:03:14.500 Well, you know that the people who are basically dealing with the coronavirus on a daily basis,
00:03:20.160 like the physicians, the medical staff, the mortuaries, the cemeteries, those folks give
00:03:27.400 the accurate numbers, but, of course, the Iranian regime channels all of that information into
00:03:33.100 official, if you will, channels, and, in fact, even the governors in different provinces have
00:03:39.660 been prohibited from giving any kind of figures concerning the virus whatsoever, in some cases
00:03:46.500 even when governors have spoken and spoken about the fatalities, they've been forced to retreat
00:03:53.740 from their comments.
00:03:55.500 And more than that, the Iranian regime has made a crime for anybody giving any kind of figures
00:04:04.280 outside of the official channels.
00:04:06.620 And so our movement, given that it has a very vast network inside Iran, as has been the case
00:04:11.760 with many other issues, such as the nuclear weapons programs, the regime's terrorism,
00:04:16.760 whatnot, and has relied on those figures to inform the public about the catastrophic scale
00:04:24.760 of the coronavirus disaster inside Iran.
00:04:27.760 In fact, we issued a very detailed report about a week ago, which was based upon information
00:04:34.760 from some 18 hospitals out of 138 hospitals in Tehran who accept coronavirus patients.
00:04:42.760 And based on that, we determined that the number of fatalities in Tehran itself is at least
00:04:49.760 10,000, which is 3,000 more than the total casualty figure that the regime has announced so far.
00:04:57.760 And so in this sense, we're quite confident about the kind of information that we received.
00:05:02.760 And incidentally, both Rouhani and other officials every day complain about facts and figures that
00:05:11.760 are being broadcast, they say, by satellite televisions abroad, which of course means the resistance
00:05:17.760 of satellite network, because we are the only one that has been given any information on the
00:05:22.760 coronavirus inside Iran, aside from some few reports by news agencies and so forth.
00:05:26.760 So in this sense, we were trying to prevent the regime from hiding the facts and the fact
00:05:35.760 that it has really done nothing to address the crisis.
00:05:38.760 Now, one other unfortunately tragic aspect of all of this is that because the monos are unwilling
00:05:44.760 to allocate the kind of money that is needed to address the people who obviously have lost
00:05:51.760 their jobs or cannot go to work. They basically have lifted the lockdown on going to work.
00:05:58.760 And so as we speak, in fact, the coronavirus, and as you addressed it in your opening statement,
00:06:04.760 is spreading like wildfire in Iran. Just yesterday, the number of people who had been infected was 3,000,
00:06:13.760 which is incredible. Everywhere else in the world, the number is coming down. The only country that is going up
00:06:18.760 in Iran, in Iran, many cities, in Khuzestan province, in Kermanshah, in Norristan, actually eight provinces,
00:06:25.760 the regime itself has declared it to be red, in a state of red, unnerved when it comes to the spread of coronavirus.
00:06:33.760 And I know there are more than 80 million people that live in Iran.
00:06:37.760 But when you're talking about a spread as massive as the numbers that your organization has found
00:06:44.760 and the casualty count that your organization has found, as I said earlier, nearly 50,000,
00:06:49.760 it stands to reason that especially in Tehran, everyone would be seeing this.
00:06:54.760 And is that true, that everyone who lives in Tehran is seeing this, they're seeing the evidence of it,
00:06:59.760 they're seeing people they know get infected, people they know die?
00:07:02.760 Because you'd think it would be very difficult, even with the grip that the regime has on the press,
00:07:08.760 you'd think it would be very difficult to keep people just from seeing the effects of this in their own lives
00:07:13.760 and in their own circles.
00:07:15.760 Absolutely. In fact, in a sense, the regime's figures and Rouhani going on television every day,
00:07:21.760 that has become a laughing stock. And people are, you know, sarcastically,
00:07:26.760 have made a mockery of what he says. In fact, his remarks and like officials in the health ministry
00:07:33.760 is in dramatic contrast with the statements by medical sciences universities across the country,
00:07:41.760 by anybody who's like a lot of physicians who are dealing with the crisis.
00:07:47.760 In fact, a few weeks ago, dozens of Iranian physicians dealing with this crisis wrote a letter to Rouhani
00:07:54.760 and said the statistics you're giving is not the actual figure and that you're not really doing anything
00:08:01.760 to curb this virus because you're forcing people to go back to work.
00:08:08.760 So yes, the Iranians are quite aware, I think even more so because they see their loved ones or their friends
00:08:14.760 and their family and their co-workers being infected.
00:08:18.760 And of course, unfortunately, a majority of them die because they don't get the necessary treatment that they require.
00:08:27.760 I know this was something that really came on my radar earlier on in the pandemic because Canada, as you know,
00:08:34.760 and as certainly many of the people in your organization likely know, has a large population of Iranian Canadians,
00:08:40.760 a lot of travel between the two, especially students and people in the health care field.
00:08:45.760 And very early on, we had a lot of our cases in Canada that weren't coming from China,
00:08:50.760 but they were coming from people that had recently traveled from Iran.
00:08:53.760 And I know that other countries have seen this as well.
00:08:56.760 So the inability or unwillingness for the Iranian regime to acknowledge what was happening early on
00:09:02.760 is really something that can be blamed directly for the spread in a lot of other countries, my own included,
00:09:09.760 and I know a lot in the United States as well.
00:09:12.760 Absolutely. You're absolutely correct.
00:09:14.760 In fact, the head of the World Health Organization branch in Iraq blamed the Iranian regime
00:09:21.760 for the virus not only to Iraq but to all of Iran's neighboring countries.
00:09:26.760 Because, as I said, while the virus had to spread to Iran, perhaps in late December or early January,
00:09:33.760 we know definitively that some people had contracted the virus as early as January 5th.
00:09:40.760 Rouhani and other folks told the Iranians we learned about it on the 19th of July.
00:09:47.760 So during that time period, thousands of people traveled from around to countries in the region,
00:09:53.760 in the Persian Gulf. Also thousands of them traveled to Europe.
00:09:58.760 As you may know, the first case of coronavirus identified in New York City was a woman who traveled there from Iran.
00:10:06.760 And so, in reality, this disaster, I guess, within Iran and outside of Iran, in many countries,
00:10:16.760 needs to be blamed on the kind of cover-up that the regime engaged in.
00:10:20.760 But again, as I said, remember the Ukrainian airliner shoot-down? Many Iranian Canadians lost their lives.
00:10:28.760 We still don't know what the details are.
00:10:30.760 And the regime for four days, three days, four days said, oh, this was an accident.
00:10:34.760 And then they said, oh, yes, it was a Russian regard missile that had hit the plane.
00:10:39.760 So, as I said, this regime is based upon lies and deception and cover-up.
00:10:45.760 And that is how it has been able to maintain its grip and power.
00:10:49.760 You know, Rouhani has hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of money under his own control.
00:10:57.760 The revolutionary guard, the same.
00:10:59.760 We have exposed them in the past through webinars and reports,
00:11:03.760 these huge economic financial institutions that they control.
00:11:08.760 And 10% of what they control would be suffice to address all these problems related to coronavirus in Iran easily.
00:11:18.760 But they are not spending any of this.
00:11:20.760 Remember that one senior parliament deputy of Iran, of the previous parliament,
00:11:28.760 because there is a new parliament now, a pretty senior figure,
00:11:33.760 he said that they had spent 30 billion dollars in Syria.
00:11:37.760 You know how many people's lives could have been saved without money?
00:11:42.760 But the priorities of this regime are different.
00:11:45.760 In a sense, in every country, you have governments and the people battling the coronavirus.
00:11:52.760 In Iran, you have the regime and the coronavirus against the people of Iran.
00:11:57.760 And so it is the population that is suffering.
00:12:00.760 But as you say, unfortunately, the scope of this tragedy is not just about Iran,
00:12:08.760 it's about the rest of the world and about the international community.
00:12:11.760 And that is precisely why the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance,
00:12:16.760 Mr. Rajabi, has repeatedly called on the international community to take a more proactive approach
00:12:22.760 when it comes to not only the coronavirus issue in Iran, but other aspects of human rights violations.
00:12:29.760 You heard about this young woman being beheaded by her father as part of an honor claim.
00:12:35.760 You hear about arrest of young Iranians, two award-winning Iranian students being arrested by the regime back on May 5th,
00:12:45.760 because of their ties with the main component of the NCRI, the majority nakhal.
00:12:53.760 Yesterday, Ibrahim Raisi, the head of the judiciary, spoke at length about the 1988 massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners.
00:13:01.760 And, you know, they just elected Mohammad Balibab as the parliament speaker,
00:13:06.760 who has a long record of killings and massacring Iranians.
00:13:11.760 And he brags about his role, about the suppression of the 1999 protests and other protests inside Iran.
00:13:19.760 And now he's become the head of the legislature.
00:13:24.760 And Ibrahim Raisi, who's by any measure a mass member, is the head of the judiciary.
00:13:33.760 I'm glad you mentioned the international community here, because I know that there's been a huge problem
00:13:39.760 in that a lot of people around the world, myself included, have been able to point to the links between the World Health Organization and China.
00:13:47.760 And really, I think, an unhealthy and very undemocratic deference that the WHO tends to have to China.
00:13:53.760 The story that hasn't been told as much is the Iranian factor.
00:13:57.760 And that's part of the reason I've been following this and I wanted to have you on the show today.
00:14:00.760 Do you think that the international community has failed the Iranian people by how it's handled the pandemic,
00:14:07.760 either on a global scale or even just in the part of the world that we're talking about now?
00:14:12.760 I couldn't agree with you more. I think, you know, the problem is, all the news or reports you see from the mainstream media
00:14:20.760 is that the sanctions are hampering the Iranian regime's efforts to address the coronavirus.
00:14:27.760 That the people of Iran are suffering because of the sanctions. That is absolutely false.
00:14:32.760 The fact is that the regime officials themselves acknowledge that they have all the money in the world to purchase medicines to address the medical issues.
00:14:46.760 Recall that the health minister himself, Rouhani's health minister, Said Namaki, said that we had allocated $1.3 billion to purchase medicine.
00:15:01.760 We don't know what happened to it.
00:15:03.760 4.8 billion dollars was lost according to the government audit of the Iranian regime's budget under Rouhani.
00:15:12.760 So where does all this money go? Who steals them?
00:15:15.760 The daughter of a foreign minister is now being charged nominally, I should say, for holding a lot of medicine, engaging in price gouging,
00:15:27.760 and basically diverting the medicine that had come to the revolutionary guard to sell the medicine in the open market ten times the price.
00:15:39.760 So you're absolutely correct that the international community has looked the other way and the mainstream media doesn't address this problem.
00:15:49.760 It seems as though it's the outside world that is the villain and not the Muslims who have basically looted and fleeced Iran out of its natural resources.
00:16:01.760 You know, Iran is a country where it's the second largest gas reserves in the world, was the fourth largest exporter of oil in the world.
00:16:11.760 Yet, 15 million Iranians go hungry every night. 25 million Iranians live in slums around major metropolitan areas.
00:16:20.760 Right now in the southwest province of Khuzestan, the problem of water shortage has become tremendously acute.
00:16:29.760 Why is this?
00:16:31.760 Mahathore Hsienicobe rules.
00:16:43.760 There was a very important official of the regime on Iranian, one of these websites of
00:16:50.860 the regime the other day, who said, I have seen these luxury houses in northern Tehran
00:16:56.780 that I have not seen anywhere else in the world.
00:16:59.320 So you can see that there is this massive discrepancy, if you will, of income distribution.
00:17:07.980 The vast majority are poor and very few are basically having all the wealth and spending
00:17:15.060 it to their own benefit.
00:17:17.700 In a country where you see the budget for the Revolutionary Guards and the security forces
00:17:23.740 and the military, roughly about $55 billion, and the budget for the health system, healthcare,
00:17:30.980 medical care, only $16 billion, that tells you what the priorities of this regime are.
00:17:36.220 And indeed, Khamenei speaking a week ago before some pro-regime students, he said, I want
00:17:44.680 a government, a Hezbollah government, and my ideal president is somebody like the eliminated
00:17:53.400 notorious Revolutionary Guard, World Force Commander Bassem Soleimani.
00:17:58.920 And that is why you see now, the Speaker of the Parliament, Mahmoud Bahr-Bahr-Bahr, is sort
00:18:05.380 of a colleague and protégé of Soleimani.
00:18:07.380 And in fact, he said, I'm going to follow in the footsteps of Soleimani, and I'm going to
00:18:13.960 avenge his elimination.
00:18:16.640 So this is really the problem, and naturally the international community has not risen to
00:18:21.520 its obligations and its standards when it comes to the issue of Iran.
00:18:25.920 Just, I guess, as a closing question here, Ali, because when you're talking about these
00:18:31.180 sorts of numbers, if the regime is trying to pretend it has everything under control
00:18:35.460 and there's no problem, that means that the regime is not responding to the crisis.
00:18:40.040 And I know that, as you know, they've prevented money from getting to actual support.
00:18:44.640 They've turned away Doctors Without Borders because, you know, the doctors weren't apparently
00:18:50.240 approved by the Iranian regime.
00:18:51.780 And they're trying to pretend that they don't need the help.
00:18:55.140 So where does it go from here?
00:18:57.640 Well, I think at the end of the day, and we've said this many, many times, the regime has
00:19:02.500 said it time and again, that the ultimate solution to all of this problem is to overthrow
00:19:08.680 this regime.
00:19:09.360 And I think the Iranian resistance is hard at work to bring that about.
00:19:15.900 We call that in November of 2019, there were anti-regime protests in more than 160 cities
00:19:25.000 across the country in all 31 provinces.
00:19:28.540 1,500 people were massacred and many of them young people shot in the head and in vital organs
00:19:34.660 by the security forces.
00:19:35.660 Ironically, after a seven-month delay, two days ago, the Interior Minister Rahmani Fazli
00:19:43.120 said, oh yeah, you know, we maybe killed some 225, and of course of those, 20% were killed
00:19:52.600 by non-standard weapons, which is ridiculous.
00:19:55.880 You know, I mean, there's hundreds of video clips of showing the security forces shooting
00:20:00.000 people from rooftops, shooting them at close range in the head and in the heart and whatnot.
00:20:06.180 So I think what the mullahs are very afraid of, quite frankly, is another uprising coming.
00:20:14.980 And the resistance units of the MEK have been quite active across the country every day.
00:20:22.640 They are engaged in acts of resistance.
00:20:24.900 And the regime keeps talking about it day in and day out.
00:20:29.720 As I told you, Khamenei, when he's speaking to pro-regime students, the Basijis, they are actually,
00:20:36.380 last week, he said that be careful that the MEK does not influence our young people.
00:20:43.540 And as I said, the fact that even the elite Iranian students are attracted to the goals
00:20:50.240 and ideals that the NCRI and the MEK advocate goes to show that change is on the way, and
00:20:57.240 certainly this regime will be overthrown.
00:21:00.100 And what is needed, I think, is some sort of recognition that this regime is an inhuman
00:21:09.740 regime that has lost all legitimacy among its own people, and that the Iranian people and
00:21:15.580 opposition needs to be assisted to finally end this 40 years of dark rule that has brought
00:21:22.580 nothing but death destruction, not only to the people of Iran, but also to the rest of the region.
00:21:29.520 Ali Savavi, official with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Foreign Affairs Committee
00:21:35.020 joins me on the line now.
00:21:36.320 Ali, thank you so much for your time.
00:21:37.720 Really appreciate it.
00:21:39.160 Thank you, Andrew, for giving me the opportunity, and keep safe.
00:21:43.840 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:21:46.500 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.