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| Iranian Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif Resigns |
| 2025-03-04 |
| [Breitbart] Iranian Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif resigned on Sunday evening, strongly implying in his resignation letter that he was forced out by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni and other theocratic hardliners. Zarif, 65, was Iran’s foreign minister from 2013 to 2021 and served as Iran’s lead negotiator for the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal was signed by President Barack Obama, but President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, citing Iranian cheating and support for terrorism. Zarif was seen as a leader in the "moderate" or "reformist" wing of Iranian politics. Along with Hassan Rouhani, who was president of Iran when the JCPOA was negotiated, Zarif endorsed "moderate" candidate Masoud Pezeshkian in the June 2024 special election to replace hardline President Ebrahim Raisi after he died in a helicopter crash. Terms like "moderate" and "reformist" are highly relative in Iranian politics, particularly since Western media constantly abuse such language to paint leaders like Zarif and Rouhani as preferable to the "hardliners." Pezeshkian won an upset victory to become a moderate and reformist president, for example, but he has not been much help when it comes to halting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and he proved quite bloodthirsty when it came to using Iran’s terrorist proxies to shed innocent blood on behalf of Hamas in the Gaza war and was willing to directly attack Israel with missiles twice after Hamas started the war on October 7, 2023. Zarif was rewarded for supporting Pezeshkian with a plum perch as vice president. He was actually Vice President for Strategic Affairs, one of several vice presidential positions in the Iranian government, although Zarif campaigned alongside Pezeshkian in a manner similar to U.S. running mates. Zarif became a major target for hardliners in Iran’s endless factional struggles for power. He actually resigned once before, only two weeks after he took office, during a power struggle over the composition of Pezeshkian’s cabinet. Pezeshkian refused to accept his resignation and Zarif was back at his desk by the end of the month. Pezeshkian did not immediately accept Zarif’s second resignation on Monday, although his office confirmed receiving the letter of resignation. Zarif’s opponents have hounded him with invocations of a law that ostensibly forbids Iranians from holding public office if they, or their children, hold dual citizenship. Zarif’s children were born in the United States when he was part of Iran’s mission to the United Nations, so they are naturalized American citizens who hold U.S. passports. Zarif wrote a testy social media post on Sunday night in which he complained about facing "the most ridiculous insults, slanders, and threats against my family in the past six months," a period he described as "the most bitter" in his forty years of government service. Zarif said he would resign on the advice of Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the chief justice of Iran, who told him to "return to the university" to "avoid further pressure on the government." Zarif has worked as a university professor and guest lecturer during most of the time he was not a government official. Related: Mohammad Javad Zarif 01/23/2025 Hamas sabotaged Iran-U.S. nuclear talks, says Iran's Vice President for Strategic Affairs Javad Zarif Mohammad Javad Zarif 11/18/2024 Iran demands trillion dollars from US Mohammad Javad Zarif 08/13/2024 Iran's New Administration Loses Key Architect of Nuclear Deal |
| Posted by:Frank G |