For the past week the Islamic Republic’s propaganda machine has been in full gear promoting an “Open Letter” written by the “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addressed to “The Youth of America and Europe.”
With this epistolary exercise, the ayatollah hopes to imitate Ali Ibn Abi-Talib who is reputed to have penned letters to one Malek al-Ashtar who served as the governor of a province during the fourth Caliph’s tenure. The tradition of writing letters to convey religious messages exists in other cultures from Saint Paul, the late convert to Christianity, to the founder of the Sikh faith Guru Nanak.
Why did Khamenei decide to pen his letter? Here is his answer: “The bitter events authored by blind terrorism in France.”
He studiously avoids saying exactly what happened and who the victims and perpetrators were. By using the word “blind” as an adjective, he also implies that there may be other kinds of terrorism that are fully sighted and thus acceptable.
An amateur poet, Khamenei then shifts to lyrical gear: “The spectacle of a baby dying in front of loved ones, a mother whose joy has become mourning, a husband who hurriedly carries the corpse of his wife, and a spectator who doesn’t know that within a few moments he is to witness the last act in his life, provokes human emotions and sentiments.” Quickly, and to avoid being accused of showing sympathy for victims of Daesh in Paris, he adds: “These scenes cause sorrow whether they happen in France, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon or Syria.” Needless to say he avoids mentioning that, to cite just one example, it is his protégé Bashar al-Assad who is doing most of the killing in Syria, and who is also using chemical weapons.
But who is to blame? Khamenei’s answer is the West; meaning the United Sates and the European Union. American and European youths are invited to “learn lessons” from “today’s roughness”. In other words, shooting un-armed civilians attending a concert with machine guns was nothing but a bit of “roughness” (na-molayemat in Persian)!
What “lessons” are there to learn? The first is that as far as Khamenei is concerned, humanity is not a single family as the Persian poet Saadi asserted. He constantly plays the “us” and “you” theme forgetting that some of those who died in Paris were Muslims. “The insecurity and anxiety you have experienced,” he says “is different from the suffering of the peoples of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.”
The second lesson proposed by “The Great Teacher”, as Tehran media refers to Khamenei, is to blame America, the ever-castigated “Great Satan.” If Daesh kills people in Paris and other places, it is the fault of America! He writes: “Today, few people are unaware of the role the United States of America played in creating and strengthening Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and their sinister successors”.
Had the “Supreme Guide” checked his facts he would have known that the Taliban appeared on the scene five years after the Americans had abandoned Afghanistan and didn’t even want to hear from it, and Al Qaeda a year after that. He would also know that it was the US who never recognized the Taliban regime and ultimately helped destroy it (Khamenei’s regime recognized the Taliban and took no action against it even when Mullah Omar’s men murdered nine Iranian diplomats. The ayatollah also played host to Osama bin Laden’s family and associates when they fled from Afghanistan after the Americans arrived in 2001).
Khamenei blames America for “oppressing the most progressive and enlightened doctrines developed by Iran’s dynamic democracy”. Khamenei doesn’t mention any of the “progressive and enlightened doctrines” that his “dynamic democracy” is supposed to have produced and that America is supposed to have “oppressed”. Maybe he is referring to the “doctrine” according to which God created the whole universe solely for Ahl al-Beit (People of the House) of which he claims to be a member.
Or maybe he means the upgrading of the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb to the status of ”Sacred Precinct”, a title not given even to major Shiite mausoleums in Najaf and Karbala, let alone Mecca and Madinah. Perhaps he means the “progressive doctrines” according to which a woman’s voice should not be heard in public or that gender apartheid should be imposed in all universities and public sector offices.
Khamenei’s claim of representing a “dynamic democracy” would have been laughable had it not been so revolting. What kind of “dynamic democracy” puts thousands of people in prison for disagreeing with the regime? What about presidential candidates Mir-Hussein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi who have been under house arrest for five years without being charged? He forgets that he has withdrawn the passports of all three former presidents of his Islamic Republic, preventing them from traveling abroad. One of those former presidents, Muhammad Khatami, has even become a non-person with a ban on mentioning his name or publishing his picture- an old Stalinist method.
Khamenei’s “dynamic democracy” is world number one for executions, political prisoners, repression against ethnic and religious minorities and media censorship. For the 36 years of its existence this regime has not spent a single day without holding some American or other Westerner hostage.
By this time you must be wondering where Khamenei would inject his Israel theme.
Well, here it is: “Another face of (America’s role) is seen in supporting the state terrorism of Israel. The long-suffering people of Palestine have experienced the worst kind of terrorism for more than sixty years.”
Interestingly, because he wants to appear impartial to Western youth, Khamenei uses the word “Israel” instead of “Zionist occupier” which he uses when he addresses Muslims. He also avoids repeating his usual pledge to “wipe the Zionist stain of shame from the map”.
The principal enemy, as seen by Khamenei, is Western civilization. He unleashes a barrage of words to condemn the west: corrupt, aggressive, transgressive, violent, and expansionist.
Western cultures promote “loose living”, whatever that means, and has produced only “pseudo-art, music and literature.” Poor Rembrandt, Beethoven, and Shakespeare! The “Supreme Guide” even invents a new word “ma’anagoriz” which means “fleeing from significance” to underline the shallowness of western civilization. Implicitly, he endorses the controversial thesis of American writer Samuel Huntington about the “clash of civilizations.”
He reveals the depth of his hatred for western civilization with another interesting Persian adjective- bi-band-o-bar. Literally, this means “without being tied by ropes or bearing a burden.” In other words, being free from pre-established religious and ideological constraints and not bearing the burden of original sin. This is in contrast to the Islamic idea of hanging on to the “firm rope” (habl al-matin) of faith and carrying the burden of trust bestowed on Adam by God (thiql al-amanah). Persian poets, among them the great Hafiz of Shiraz, lamented the fact that they couldn’t break loose from the rope and throw away the burden.
Although his supporters like to market him as Leader of the Islamic Ummah as a whole, Khamenei betrays a measure of Persian nationalism, not to say chauvinism.
He casts traditional Islam as “an extremist and discarded thinking (that was produced) in the heart of a Bedouin tribe in a desert.”
ISIS, Khamenei claims, is a synthesis of that “Bedouin” ideology with Western culture. In a recent speech Khamenei’s foreign policy adviser Ali-Akbar Velayati claimed that it was thanks to Iran’s contribution that Islam became a great humanitarian civilization. He also claimed that 50 per cent of Islam’s greatest theologians, philosophers and teachers had been Iranians.
That Khamenei’s letter unleashes a tsunami of semi-romantic verbiage is of little consequence. What causes concern is his distortion of historic facts, whether intentional or as a result of insufficient knowledge. He writes: “If the problem (of terrorism) was (the Islamic) faith we should have witnessed similar phenomena in the Islamic world before the colonial era.” In other words Islamist terror developed in reaction to Western colonialism and later Imperialism.
How true is that? What about the fact that three of the four Well-Guided Caliphs, immediate successors of the Prophet, were assassinated? Was the Kharijite movement a reaction to Western colonialism? What about the carnage in Karbala and counter-massacres led by Mokhtar al-Thaqafi, the violence of Qaramata, the serial killings by Malahedah (assassins), the atrocities of Mushaashaiyah and the regular chopping of heads by Sarbedaran?
All of that happened long before there was Western colonialism and centuries before Christopher Columbus “discovered” America.
In more recent times, we have had other violent groups born and bred within Islam, often led by individuals who, like Khamenei, claimed to be the sole possessors of “true Islam” or, as he likes to say, “Pure Muhammadan Islam” who regularly cause murder and mayhem.
Here are a few of those groups that Khamenei may not have heard of: the Akhund of Swat, the Zarraq Khan clan, Mullah Hassan of Mogadishu, the Ansar in the Sudan, the Heydari Long Knives, the Senusi Ghazis, the Qypchaq slave-traders, and, more recently the various brands of Ikhwan (brotherhood) in several Arab countries. In Iran itself we had the Fedayeen of Islam which the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini was a member of, issuing fatwas to murder Iranian intellectuals and politicians, not Western Imperialists.
What about the murder of 117 Iranian dissidents in 16 countries in the Middle East, Europe and the United States by “Unknown Soldiers of the Imam” sent from Tehran in the 1980s and” 90s? Investigating the murder of Kurdish Iranian dissidents in Germany, the Criminal Court in Berlin cited four of Tehran’s top leaders, among them Khamenei himself, as responsible for the atrocity.
Khamenei concludes his letter by inviting “The Youth of Europe and America” to “cooperate with Islam”, even if they shun mass conversion. In exchange, he says, they will enjoy “the warmth of security and tranquillity”, while Islam “spreads the rays of hope for a bright future across the face of the globe”. The deal he offers may remind us of offers by Cosa Nostra that cannot be refused.