Iran charges U.S. scholar with trying to overthrow the government

First they loosely accused her of being a Zionist stooge, and now there’s a formal new charge: that Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who had returned to Iran to see her 93-year-old mother and is now in a Tehran prison, has been plotting the overthrow of the Iranian government.

According to a statement released by the Ministry of Intelligence:

In primary interrogations, she reiterated that Soros Foundation has established an unofficial network with the potential of future broader expansion, whose main objective is overthrowing the system.”

My goodness! Not the dreaded Soros Foundation, with its … grants, its seminars, its lectures, and its transparency initiatives! Moving on:

In conducted research Mrs. Esfandiari has pointed out that the center’s activities and programs related to Iran were sponsored and financed by the famous Soros oundation [sic], that is a US foundation owned by George Soros that has played key roles in intrigues that have led to colorful revolutions in former USSR republics in recent years.”

The Iranians have issued a warrant for the arrest of the Soros Foundation’s representative in Iran. The (badly translated) statement ends with the following:

The ultimate goal of those foundations, too, is to fortify those networks at fields that are of interest for them and reaping the fruits of such activities in due time, that is nothing but people’s confrontation with the system. This US designed model with its hallucinating and chanting sign is aimed at soft overthrowing of the system.”

Iran’s leadership certainly seems to be getting paranoid, but they’re barking up the wrong tree here. According to David Samuels’ cover story in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are “funding sectarian political movements and paramilitary groups in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.” I’m 100 percent confident that Haleh Esfandiari isn’t tied up in any of that business.