As Iran released another political prisoner on Thursday, Israelâs prime minister slipped into Persian to suggest that only âsadeloh,â or âdupes,â would be fooled by recent diplomatic overtures from the clerical government in Tehran.
The release of the dissident journalist, Isa Saharkhiz, was confirmed to The Lede by his son Mehdi, a graphic designer and blogger based in New Jersey who later posted an image of his father at home on Twitter.
Before his arrest in 2009, during street protests over the disputed presidential election, Mr. Saharkhiz had worked on the campaign of a leading opposition candidate, Mehdi Karroubi. A decade earlier, he had served in the reformist administration of President Mohammad Khatami, overseeing a brief flowering of independent newspapers.
The subsequent suppression of those publications by hardliners encouraged young reformists to turn instead to the Internet to express themselves and organize. The younger Mr. Saharkhiz, who blogs as OnlyMehdi, played an important role in disseminating video of the 2009 protests on YouTube.
Speaking on Thursday to BBC Persian, a satellite news channel widely viewed inside Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to the most indelible video of the brutal crackdown on dissent in 2009 as evidence that Iranâs people were being held hostage by an authoritarian government.
âThe issue is this regimeâs control of Iran,â he said, âits aggressive designs, the brutalization of its own people, its own people. We donât forget. I saw Neda on the sidewalk, I saw her choking in her own blood. I saw the desire of the Iranian people to have real freedom, a real life. I know that, its there.â
Unlike President Obama, who said in his address to the United Nations General Assembly last week that the United States was ânot seeking regime changeâ in Iran, Mr. Netanyahu argued in his appeal to the Iranian people that they would never be free of the clerical theocracy if it armed itself with nuclear weapons.
In another part of the interview posted online by his office, Mr. Netanyahu continued to argue that Iran was bluffing over the ultimate aim of its nuclear program, slipping into Persian to cast the Iranian leadershipâs âharfe pooch,â or âempty words,â as convincing only âsadeloh,â or âdupes.â
Mr. Netanyahu spoke hours after Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that he âdid not interpret Prime Minister Netanyahuâs commentsâ on Iran this week âas suggesting that we are being played, somehow, for suckers. I understood it to be a warning: Donât be played.â
Mr. Netanyahu heaped scorn on what he called a duplicitous charm offensive by Iranâs new president, Hassan Rouhani, during his address to the U.N. on Tuesday. He amplified those comments in an interview with NBC News in which he said, âEverybody knows that Iran wants to destroy Israel and that itâs building, trying to build atomic bombs for that purpose. You donât want to be in a position where this messianic, apocalyptic, radical regime that has these wild ambitions but nice spokesmen, gets away with building the weapons of mass death.â
Later in the interview, Mr. Netanyahu dismissed the election that brought Mr. Rouhani to the presidency this year, and reiterated his conviction that ultimate authority in Iran rests with a supreme leader who is a dangerous religious fanatic. âIf they had a free go, are you kidding, theyâd toss out this regime, theyâd go in bluejeans,â the Israeli prime minister said. âI mean these people, the Iranian people, the majority of them are actually pro-Western. But they donât have that. Theyâre governed not by Rouhani. Theyâre governed by Ayatollah Khamenei. He heads a cult. That cult is wild in its ambitions and its aggression.â