[Pajamas Media/Jerusalem Post] Meir Javedanfar - After the sudden resignation of Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, questions are being asked about the background and beliefs of his successor, Saeed Jalili. The most worrying revelation about Jalili's past appeared recently in the Teheran-based Iran Diplomacy Web site, which said that for most of his career at the Foreign Ministry, Jalili worked closely with Mojtaba Hashemi Samare, a leading messianic and a close ally of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi. Yazdi is a former member of the Hojattieh, a messianic splinter group which was disbanded by Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s because of its extremist views. The sect's goals are to sow chaos - the goal of which is to incite a massive war, presumably necessary to speed up the return of the Shi'ite messiah, known as the Mahdi. Jalili's appointment as the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and as the head of Iran's nuclear negotiation team shows that the messianics have scored another major victory in placing one of their allies in a senior political position. They currently hold positions of power in the Ministry of Intelligence (Gholam Hosssein Ejehi), Ministry of Interior (Mostafa Pour Mohammadi), and, of course, the Presidency (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). The writer is the co-author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran. He runs the Middle East Economic and Political Analysis (Meepas).
2007-10-24 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive