Juno News - Iran’s deadly coronavirus lies

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 0.90

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 0.97

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. 0.99

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 1.00

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, 0.80

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. 1.00

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. 0.69

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 1.00

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 0.73

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 0.88

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. 0.98

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.

Juno News - June 04, 2020

Iran’s deadly coronavirus lies

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