MS NOW Panel Compares Iran’s ‘Deep Belief’ and Use of Human Shields Favorably to Trump
MS NOW’s Stephanie Ruhle and Richard Stengel compared the Iranian regime’s “deep belief” and even its use of human shields at power plants and other vulnerable targets favorably to President Donald Trump’s worldview on Wednesday evening.
Ruhle and Stengel’s comment came after The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett submitted that “President Trump comes from a background where he assumes that money can buy everything, and money drives everything, and he wants to cut a deal with everyone using money, and he assumes other people will basically fall in line on the back of that.”
“So the fact that the Iranian regime has a really strong conviction, which frankly at this point doesn’t have much to do with money, it’s to do survival and their vision of what the nation is-” added Tett as one of her fellow panelists chimed in, “and religion.”
“A religion, you know, and we might hate that, we might like it, whatever, but it’s a very different mentality that President Trump is the very worst person to try and empathize with and understand. And if you don’t empathize with your opponent and understand what’s driving them, it’s very hard to make a deal,” she concluded.
Ruhle and Stengel took it from there:
STENGEL: He doesn’t understand anybody who believes in anything. And by the way, people who are really outr-
RUHLE: I mean, this is a phenomenal point, because you could disagree with Iran and what their point of view is, but it’s the fact that they have a deep belief in something, that’s unfathomable to him.
OFF-SCREEN PANELIST: That they will die for.
RUHLE: That they will die for, that they’ll destroy their country for.
STENGEL: Yes, I mean, he has no ideological belief or patriotism about America, and he doesn’t think anybody else does. So when he sees Iranians lining up around power grids, he can’t understand that. He thinks they’re being paid to do it. But the people who can identify with this, who are very, very unhappy about this, are the Gulf states. The Gulf states were, America is protecting them, they signed the Abraham Accords, they always were against Iran, they worried about Iran. And when I was in the State Department and visited all the Gulf states to talk about ISIS, they would go, “ISIS, schmisis, we’re much more concerned about Iran.” And now, Big brother, big daddy that was supposed to deal with Iran has not. Iran is more empowered over the straits. All of their oil goes through the straits. I mean, they feel like now they’re out there on a limb with nothing.
The Iranian government — which slaughtered somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 of its own people amid widespread protests earlier this year — had called on citizens to join hands around the country’s power plants as human shields after Trump issued a threat to destroy them.
The theocratic regime is infamous for using civilians in warfare, and especially its employment of human wave attacks during the 1980s’ Iran-Iraq War.
Watch above via MS NOW.
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