“It would be very naive to think the enemy is not pursuing a dangerous scenario (against the country),” General Salami said on Wednesday, addressing a cultural event in Mashhad, some 900 kilometers east of Tehran.
The enemy seeks to turn the Islamic Establishment into a passive one, he said.
“That is to say, they want to alter the cultural and social roots of our country,”the senior commander observed, stressing the need to counter the scheme.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has also on many occasions urged vigilance in the face of enemy ploys to gain a political and cultural foothold in Iran, warning that the consequences of such infiltration would be much worse than that of enemy’s economic influence.
“Economic and security infiltration is of course dangerous and has dire consequences, but the enemy’s political and cultural infiltration (into Iran) is a much more serious threat that everyone should be vigilant about,” Ayatollah Khamenei said back in September 2015.
As part of plans for cultural infiltration, the enemy has made heavy investment to gradually change the Iranian people’s beliefs, the Leader explained at the time.
Elsewhere in his Wednesday address in Mashhad, General Salami referred to letters by Ayatollah Khamenei to the youth in the West, stressing that the message of the letters “which presented the true image of Islam” should be promoted through the cyberspace.
The Leader in a letter in January 2015 introduced the true image of Islam to youths in Europe and North America, and elaborated on the reasons behind the West’s attempts to spread Islamophobia.
Ayatollah Khamenei wrote his second letter to the youth in the West on November 29, following a series of terrorist attacks in Paris.
In that letter, the Leader underlined that it is only the “youth , who by learning lessons from today’s hardships, will be able to find new solutions for building the future, and block off-roads which have led the West to this current position.”