Iran’s PressTV state news agency published an interview with an alleged American “scholar” Wednesday who branded President Donald Trump a “child rapist” and claimed American laws require the executions of Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the airstrike on Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani.
The “scholar” in question, Kevin Barrett, hosts independent talk programs online titled “Truth Jihad Radio” and “False Flag Weekly News.” He has publicly described the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as an “inside job” and referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “Jeffrey Epstein’s mob boss.”
Barrett claims a Ph.D. in Islamic and Arabic Studies and has taught at universities throughout the United States, including a controversial stint as a lecturer in “Islam history and culture” at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2006.
Barrett called into PressTV from Madison on Wednesday.
“Mike Pompeo and the Trump administration have been giving a series of obviously false stories about their reason for murdering General Qasem Soleimani,” Barrett claimed, referring to an airstrike this month that eliminated the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force. The IRGC is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization; as head of the Quds Force, Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American forces and thousands of civilians in Iraq, Syria, and beyond.
“Originally, they said that General Soleimani was about to strike American troops, kill American troops. … but they had absolutely no evidence to back it up. So then they shifted to an even more absurd story: They said that General Soleimani was working on a plot to attack four different American embassies all over the world,” Barrett contended on the Iranian broadcast.
“Nobody who has the least awareness of what’s actually going on in the region would credit this kind of plan,” he asserted.
Barrett did not note the public evidence of Soleimani’s role in targeting American civilians: a mob attack by supporters of the Iranian regime on the American embassy in Baghdad the weekend before the airstrike on Soleimani. Most of those in the mob were believed to be either members or supporters of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shiite, pro-Iran militias that the Iraqi government legalized, despite several of its members being terrorist organizations. Eliminated alongside Soleimani was the head of one of those militias, the Hezbollah Brigades, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The mob spray-painted “Soleimani is our commander” on the side of the U.S. embassy.
Written on the wall of #US embassy in #Baghdad:
"People say no to America"
"Soleimani (Qasem Soleimani) is our commander" #Iran #Iraq pic.twitter.com/QT7zctQEWn— Nafiseh Kohnavard (@nafisehkBBC) January 2, 2020
Barrett nonetheless claimed no evidence existed that Soleimani was planning to attack Americans. “That makes the murder of Soleimani clearly illegal, a war crime, and an act of murder,” he claimed.
“Here in the United States, murders are still executed. So President Trump, Mike Pompeo, and whoever else is behind the crime, theoretically, should be facing execution,” he declared. “However, thats unlikely to happen given the sycophancy of the Democrats who rarely stand up to the Trump administration. They will not bring out the real crimes committed by Donald Trump and his administration.”
“Capital punishment is currently authorized in 29 states, by the federal government and the U.S. military,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The federal government stopped executing convicted felons on death row in 2003, but the Justice Department announced last year it would end that de facto moratorium.
Among the “real crimes” Barrett listed were being “an agent of Israel and its organized crime elements around the world which created Donald Trump” and being a “child rapist” who, he alleged, participated in child sexual assault with late financier Jeffrey Epstein. He then lamented, without evidence, that “the majority of the money coming into the Democratic Party … comes from rich Zionist Jewish supporters of Israel.”
According to Snopes, a fact-checking website disinclined to favoritism towards President Trump, the allegation involving Epstein stemmed from a mystery lawsuit filed in 2016, amid the heated presidential race.
“As of now, all of the information about this lawsuit comes solely from the complaint filed by ‘Katie Johnson,’ and no one has as yet located, identified, or interviewed her,” Snopes reported at the time .”She was scheduled to appear at a press conference on 2 November 2016 but didn’t show up, claiming that threats to her life kept her away. She reportedly dropped the lawsuit again on 4 November 2016 for the same reason.”
Politifact, another fact-checking organization, also denounced doctored images circulating this year of Trump and Epstein.
Trump has admitted to meeting Epstein on at least one occasion, according to Snopes.
When not providing commentary for Iranian state media, Barrett advocates for Iranian interests on social media.
Soleimani is dead, long live Soleimani, greatest military hero of the century, a true warrior-saint. pic.twitter.com/Uf6ItHMejk
— Kevin Barrett (@truthjihad) January 8, 2020
Barrett protested on the “Veterans Today” that Facebook censored the above post, a tribute to the head of a faction of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. He has also recently proposed that the Israeli government shot down Ukrainian International Airlines (UIA) Flight 752, which Tehran has already admitted to targeting and blowing out of the sky.
Iranian officials subsequently made a similar claim, however, that a U.S. “cyberattack” or espionage could have resulted in an Iranian missile targeting the commercial airliner shortly after flying out of Tehran’s international airport.