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March 4th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Press TV has conducted an interview with William Beeman, professor at the University of Minnesota, to further discuss the recent Iranian parliamentary elections and the large participation rate in it.
The interview also provides insights of political commentator, Ralph Schoenman, from New Jersey.
What follows is a rough transcription of the interview:
Press TV: Huge excitement, a lot of attention has been drawn to these parliamentary elections both within Iran and outside. You have been following the events as they have been taking place.
First of all I like to get your initial reaction to the way things have been conducted so far.
Beeman: Well, I wish that I were in Iran myself, so that I could actually witness the things directly. It does appear that there has been a very large voter turnout in Tehran and I will be waiting for the results in new election system with electronic voting, is going to be very interesting.
You know that in the United States when we made the transition to electronic voting there were some problems and the people had worried about the accuracy of the vote count.
So I think it would be very important for the government to assure that the vote count is accurate and that the electronic voting system had not been tempered with.
But I want to make one important comment and that is that, in the United States there are some people in some circles who felt that the sanctions on Iran would result in the Iranian people rising up and overthrowing their own government because they have been made so miserable and a number of us have pointed out how ridicules that scenario is.
When a population is under pressure from the outside, they do not rise up and overthrow their own government, they rally behind their leaders and this is, I think in this particular case when we take a look at the elections, I think we will find that the Iranian people have not been discouraged by the sanctions that have been leveled against them, but in fact have shown their patriotism and their love of their own country.
Press TV: Professor Beeman as Mr. Schoenman pointed out there has been a lot of warmongering propaganda, within the West with regards to Iran. We have also seen the way their media has spun these elections giving it a very negative outlook.
I would like to get your opinion on how such a huge voter turnout and large participation goes to show social cohesiveness and unity within the Iranian society and sort of negates most of the propaganda that is being thrown towards Iran?
Beeman: Well, as I said to you before, when a nation finds itself under siege and under danger it tends to unify.
In the United States when we had the attacks on September 11th in 2001, the nation both Democrats and Republicans came together and buried their differences and supported the president at that time. It was the largest support that he got.
Then later on, we had a lot of dissention and opposition to President Bush. But at the time of the attacks, they were very unified and I think that in Iran we have right now again the American and Western press and also from President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, the most horrible threat to attacking Iran and in a situation like this, I think that Iranian people know that they must have strong leadership in order to be able to withstand those attacks.
So, it is really not surprising to me that there would have been a strong turnout for the elections and a unifying force in the nation and as we know there are different political opinions in Iran and that has been going on for the last two years.
But if Iran is about to be attacked from outside as all of us who know Iran very well have said again and again and again, the Iranian people are first of all, patriotic.
Second of all, they love their country and they will defend their country to the very, very end in a very strong way.
And if the Western powers and Israel doesn’t understand that, then they are really very foolish indeed and of course let me also point out that the most terrible part of the threats that have been leveled against Iran is that they are based on false premises and on lies.
There is no evidence anywhere that Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons, nor has it nuclear weapons program. This has been verified by Israeli military leaders, by MOSSAD in Israel, by our own National Intelligence director, by our own Secretary of Defense, by every International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] report and by America’s own National Intelligence Estimate.
And so for us that is to have an incipient attack on Iran based on some fictional, mystical kind of nuclear weapons program that does not exist or cannot be proven to exist, is really chicanery on the part of the Western powers.
It is warmongering and it is really frankly aimed not at crippling Iran’s nuclear [energy] program, but at regime change.
They feel that if they bomb Iran, people will be so disheartened that they will rise up and overthrow their own leaders and we have seen in this election that that is not happening.
Press TV: These elections are coming at a time when we are seeing revolutions and uprisings across the region in the Middle East, in North Africa, where people’s aspirations for religion and democracy to be combined into one political landscape.
What is this going to do for that aspiration of the people within the region?
Beeman: Well, the right to vote in free and fair elections is one of the most important rights that any population has.
In throughout the region we have seen elections that have had very success throughout the Middle Eastern region.
But every time they are carried out and they are carried out successfully, the people in these nations feel that they have progressed one step toward self determination.
We are still working our way out of a period of time when most Middle Eastern nations were in one way or another under the domination of Western powers.
And what the people of the region want is of course to have self determination, to have free and fair elections and to be able to express themselves that way in such exercises.
So, I think that in this regard, the people of Iran should be very pleased that they have this opportunity and they clearly have exercised that right.
MY/AHK/JR
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