The Making of Modern Iran (Part 2) | The Red-Green Alliance

Welcome back to Breaking History. In the last episode we explored the prelude to Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, the rise of the Pallavi dynasty. In this episode, we examined the life of the cleric who helped lead that revolution. His name was Ayatollah Ruhollah Chomenei. And he ended 2500 years of Iranian monarchs from his exile in a chateau on the outskirts of Paris. He couldn't have done that without the consent and support of liberals and leftists at home and abroad. After the break, the first red green alliance and a reminder of how it works today. [Music] Cutting off military funding for a government that is starving 2 million people and advertising how they're ethnically cleansing the Palestinians seems like the least we can do. Especially if we're going to head into a primary, like table stakes, it's going to be no more military for Israel. So there will just have to be a shift and I do think that will mean putting far more pressure on Israel. And that's what I think Democrats want. By the way, that's what the country wants. And when you pull Israelis, they say they want a fucking ceasefire. Israelis want the hostages returned through a negotiated settlement. And by the way, that's the way in which the vast majority of hostages who were returned were able to be returned. We just heard from the former Obama speech writers on their popular POD SAVE America podcast, making the case against the US Israel alliance. No Democrat should take a pack money, cut off the US military aid. Israel, you see, is starving 2 million people. And they're doing it deliberately. It's a moral stain on our republic that we enable this horror. To paraphrase the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, POD DAMM America. This marks a significant moment for the Democrats in the days after October 7, 2023, a fringe of left-wing activists, professors and students responded to the murder and rape spree led by Hamas with a kind of jubilation. Over time, this raucous street energy settled on a message that Israel's response to the worst program against Jews since the Holocaust was itself a Holocaust. Israel was committing a genocide, you see. Well, the last Democratic president Joe Biden didn't go along with that, and neither did most Democrats in Congress. Biden rushed weapons to the Jewish state and instructed his diplomats to counter the international campaign to demonize the victims of October 7. But over time, he too became concerned about the intensity of Israel's war efforts. Those protesters out in this street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed from both sides. Now to be sure, the POD SAVE America team will stipulate something the fringe left would noticeably not say in the aftermath of October 7. Hamas is evil, or they started the war. Nonetheless, their arrows today in 2025 are aimed straight at the country trying to rescue the remaining hostages that Hamas stole nearly two years ago. They propose only pressure at this point on Israel, and they are not alone. Last week, more than half of the Democrats in the Senate voted yes on resolutions to cut off the military aid. The government of France last week announced that it would be recognizing a Palestinian state in September. The United Kingdom will do the same unless there is a ceasefire that ends the war. This is the moment to act. So today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm that UK will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza. A great to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution. Even though both the Trump and Biden administration have said repeatedly that Hamas has time and again rejected ceasefire offers to return the people they kidnapped, POD SAVE America, most of the Democratic Party, and our European allies, Israel, is the villain. So what's going on here? Recognition of a Palestinian state before the dismantlement of what is left of Hamas is a victory for the plotters of October 7. Terrorism works, guys. The peace process was dormant on October 6, 2023, not even two years later. Leaders of Europe will recognize a Palestinian state. And this dynamic is even harder to explain given who Hamas really is. It's not like they tried to hide their lust for Jewish blood. They recorded video of their atrocities on October 7th and posted them to the messaging app Telegram. Hamas are Muslim fanatics. They adhere to a political ideology born in the early 20th century that seeks to reestablish the caliphate of the first Islamic empire of the eighth and ninth century. They pay lip service from time to time to democratic elections when they are out of power. But when Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, they began a reign of autocratic terror. Hamas executes gays, members of the opposition and journalists. They force women to hide their hair and faces. How could liberals and progressives find themselves trusting statistics and reports from clerical fascists over a Jewish democracy and American ally? Well, some of this is because urban warfare is brutal. Hamas maximizes Gaza in casualties as a strategy and images of a war, though there is much deception, are gut-wrenching. The New York Times had to walk back a front-page photo of an emaciated child that said was starved by Israel's policy of restricting food aid to Gaza after it was revealed that the child had a pre-existing medical condition. His mother, by the way, was well fed in the photo and his brother, also looking nourished, was cropped out of that original photo. Now this is not to say that hunger is not real in Gaza, it most certainly is. But the reasons for this tragedy are more complicated. Progressives and liberals in America and Europe have blamed this catastrophe solely on Israel. As the democratic party has found itself on the same side, as the reactionary belligerence that started the war they decry. Well, it's not the first time this kind of thing has happened. Welcome back to Breaking History, I'm Eli Lake, and in part two of this special episode on the making of modern Iran, we dive into the first red green alliance when the international and Iranian left lined up behind an austere and violent cleric who ended 2500 years of Iranian kings. How could the champions, women's rights and democracy find themselves cooperating in the births of Islamic fascism for Iran? After the break, we find out. You told the soldiers you can jump, be eyeing on luck, and when they stay inside the barracks, you sent your dues, I tried to scare them, you stole the raven duchun, now give it back. You promised a constitution, then took it back. You stole the raven duchun, we thought the law, how many has the duchun, we'll be enough. We came into the streets with the Shahzad, we wanted to be brief, but now we have the hide, the center was a bomb. Journalists and prison, the mooters were to run, we were on arrested for the decisions. Iran is a country of recurring earthquakes, and in 1960s suffered from one of the most violent in the nation's modern history. It brought death and destruction to 200 communities scattered over a wide area, and temporarily made untillable hundreds of thousands of agricultural acres, farmlands in which the country's economy greatly depends. Under the personal direction of the Shah, Iran was just recovering from this tragedy when its latest troubles erupted. Ironically, one of the causes of the new rioting was the Shahz Land Reform Program instituted to ease the lot of the country's impoverished peasants at the expense of large landholders. A secondary contributing trouble factor was the Shahz plans for the emancipation of the nation's women. Rioting against this program was led by leaders of a strict Muslim psyched oppose to women's suffrage. to a kind of time capsule. A clip from a US government black and white propaganda film on the civil unrest sparked by Mother Nature and Shah Muhammad Resipolavi's ambitious set of reforms. The year is 1963. The now middle-aged Shah has survived two failed coups, national strikes, as well as frosty relations with the Kennedy administration. He is no longer dueling with a prime minister, as he did with Muhammad Mosina, back in 1953. Muhammad Resipolavi is the supreme leader of Iran. He appoints a new prime minister about every 11 months. In reality, he tolerates corruption. He's also forever sacking ministers accused of it in many ways to score PR points. And he has also raised a secret police force known as the Savak to spy on his allies and opponents. In some ways, the Shah was finally coming into his own. In this period, he is a bold leader, not the unshore monarch who had to be persuaded by his own family and a parade of US officials to fire Mosina in 1953. By 1963, the Shah would be furthering his father's legacy of modernization. He called it the white revolution. Now we should say, this was not an actual revolution. These were royal decrees. Iran in this period was no longer a constitutional monarchy. As it was in the 1940s and early 1950s, it is an absolute monarchy at this point. And the parliament or Majles and the constitution itself really served as a kind of window dressing. At the same time, the white revolution was in substance exactly the kind of reforms advocated by the Shah's former rival, Mosadath, and before him, the original liberals during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. At the core of the Shah's decrees was the transfer of land owned by the old aristocracy to the subsistence farmers who worked on their plantations. In this sense, the white revolution really was revolutionary. The Shah was ending an exploitation that had endured for centuries. Even the country's form aspect has different faces. Because once you give peasants land, you have to establish some sort of a bank for them to be able to get money to buy farm implements that they didn't have themselves. So entire financial infrastructure is created against that. This is Reita Kay, a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations in the author of The Last Shah. So there's a whole thing happening about essentially transforming peasants into successful small farm land-owning families. In some phases unfold better than others and there certainly was inefficiency and so forth. But it remains even by the acknowledgement of the Islamic Republic itself, a substantial amount of land was transferred. It had other element to it, as you mentioned, women's franchise, the ability to vote in elections. And it had other aspect to it. The Shah created a whole court, a health court, a literacy court. And you began to see all these people going to villages. And when you essentially sent a literacy court from Tehran to the villages, you're taking over the function of education from the clergy to the state. It wasn't just the seminary schools that the white revolution threatened. The mullahs had also traditionally served as a quasi legal arbitrator for land purposes. The land reform would cut the clerics out of the process. And this threat to the status and finances of the cleracy had consequences. And those consequences took the form of a particularly austere and radical Iatola. We know him as Rahulah Khomeini. Born in 1902, he was nearly 20 years the Shah's senior. And he considered the ruler of Iran to be a weak and feckless dilatant. Remember the second Pallavi leader was born into obscene privilege and wealth. Khomeini had more in common with the Shah's father, who also endured poverty and hardship as a child. And like the first Pallavi, Khomeini was an orphan by the time he was a teenager. His father was murdered when he was an infant. His mother died in 1918 from cholera. Now by the summer of 1963, the gloves were off for Khomeini. All of his resentment at Iran's feckless king poured out of him in a famous speech, delivered at the Fazayyad seminary, where only a few months earlier the Savak had arrested his students. He attacked the Shah in the most personal way by pretending to be looking out for his best interest. He warned him that if he continued the reforms of the white revolution, he would face the same fetus as his father, who was exiled and dethroned after the British and Soviet armies invaded Iran in 1941 during World War II. Here is a portion of that speech. You, M. Rebolehrich, 45 years of your life have passed. Isn't it time for you to think and reflect a little? To wonder about where all this is leading you. To learn a lesson from the experience of your father, if what this is true, that you are opposed to Islam and the religious scholars, your ideas are quite wrong. If they are dictating these things to you and then giving them to you to read, you should think about it a little. Why do you speak without thinking? Are the religious scholars really some form of "empure animals"? If they are impure animals, why do the people kiss their hands? Why do they regard the very water they drink as blessed? Are we really impure animals? I hope to God that you did not have in mind the olema and the religious scholars when you said that the actionaries are like an impure animal. Because if you did, it will be difficult for us to tolerate you much longer and you will find yourself in predicament. You want to be able to go on living. The nation will not allow you to continue this way. Pomeini had been delivering speeches like this for months, but this one crossed the line. He was now personally attacking the Iranian leader. He called him a miserable "retch" for God's sake and all but threatened his life. How did it get to this? Why didn't the Shah nip his "komeini" problem in the bud? Well, you have to remember that in modern Iranian politics, there was always a balance between the state and the mosque. The moas could be political figures, but for the most part, the cleric did not concern itself with governing by the dictates of Shia Islam. This quietest tradition, as it is known, was the consensus view of the Grand Ayatollahs, the imams that had the most respect among their peers. But just because there was a consensus that the clerics would concern themselves with the spiritual realm did not mean they did not have an influence on politics. The initial uprising that led to the constitutional revolution that we covered in episode one was sparked by a Moa, Jamal Al-Din, is Fahani, railing against excessive price controls on sugar. Prime Minister Mosadeh eventually had to resign his office because of street protests led by his former ally Ayatollah Khashani, who was also a major influence on Khomeini. So the Shah had to tread very carefully. The clerics in Khome held the keys to Iran's turbulent street politics. Now, we should also say that there were limits. The Shah could not allow a popular Ayatollah to prophesy his demise and insult him personally. So on June 5th, the Shah sent his Savaq to the Faza Yed Seminary again in Khome, their mission? A rest Ayatollah Khomeini. It seemed like his followers were waiting for it because when words spread of the arrest tens of thousands of Khomeini's followers flooded the streets of Tehran, like a medieval band of leading conquerors. They burned cinemas and banks. They smashed the shop windows in the Bazaar. They staged sit-ins at bus stations and police precincts. This was not a peaceful demonstration. It was a riot. Marshal Law was declared in Tehran, the army sent personnel carriers with soldiers to the entrance of the Bazaar along with fire trucks and police fans, at least 125 rioters perished in the clashes. Some estimates say it's as high as 400. Now, we should make it clear that Khomeini at this point is a reactionary figure. He is not railing against the Shah because of the treatment of political dissidents or the lack of meaningful elections. His quarrel is with the Shah building secular schools in the countryside and giving women the right to vote in a referendum. One of his first campaigns in the late 1950s was to stop the practice of Iranian boy scouts commingling at social events with Iranian girl scouts. He seized at the popularity of western movies and public dancing. Add to this, Khomeini is also a proponent of terrorism. Khomeini was a radical Islamist long before he became the Khomeini living out today. This is a Basm in Lonnie historian and the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. In 1945, for example, Islamist terrorist by the name of Nablova Safavik emerges on the scene. It kills one of Iran's most prominent secular intellectuals called Khashravi. And the grand Ayatollah of the time, the most influential Ayatollah, probably in 20th century shiasm, Ayatollah Buryjrdi, bands Safavik from all seminars. This is this guy as a troublemaker. One of the only clergy who defies spirituality secretly, but tempers and protects, and have love of self-evident terrorists, is how many? So one must ask, how could Iran's progressives and liberals sublimate their movement to the leadership of a terror-loving reactionary in 1979? One part of that answer is, the Khomeini had a remarkable gift for couching his postmodern medieval politics in the language of anti-imperialism. Remember, this is 1963. A few years after the publication of Franz Fanon's "Retret of the Earth", a text that is still revered by campus radicals more than 60 years later and inspired the more secular, Yasser Errfat to form the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Khomeini was a vocal critic of the Shah's diplomatic normalization with Israel. He was, in a sense, an early adopter in Iran, at least, of the Palestinian cause. Here's an excerpt from that June 3rd, 1963 sermon that God had arrested. Israel does not wish the Quran to exist in this country. Israel doesn't wish the Olimat to exist in this country. Israel does not wish a single learned man to exist in this country. It was Israel that assaulted Fazeemadras Amaya, means of its sinister agents. It is still assaulting us, and assaulting you. The nation wishes to seize your economy, to destroy your trade and agriculture, to appropriate your wealth. Israel wishes to remove by means of its agents anything, in regards as a blocking its path. This was not merely a lie. The Savak raided the Fazeemasq, not Israel, but conspiratorial Western anti-Semitism grafted onto radical Islam, accusing Israel of seeking to destroy the Quran. It's not that different from blaming Jews for killing Christ or plotting global domination. It was also effective, demonizing Israel appealed to millions of Iranians. All this presented a major problem for the Shah. On the one hand, he could not allow Khomeini to continue to stir up the country. But Khomeini was not only popular, he was an ayatollah. There was an unwritten rule against executing these senior clerics, who held much sway over street politics, and Khomeini certainly had that. If Khomeini was made a martyr, then riots in Tehran would be a prelude to a wave of terror and armed insurgency. This dilemma fell into the lap of one of the most fascinating characters in the Shah's Iran, the second director of Savak, Hassan Pakrava, as the Shah's secret police, the Savak, earned a reputation for the brutal treatment of political prisoners. Though exaggerated at times in the 1970s, there's plenty of evidence that, particularly in the 1950s and '60s, Savak agents routinely employed torture against high-value prisoners, including the use of electric shocks to the body's most sensitive parts. But when Pakravaan was named director in 1963, he implemented real reforms. Again, this is a posse-melani. Hassan Pakravaan was a deputy director, first and then director. He was a very erudite man, had extensive connections with the Iranian intelligence. His mother is clearly one of the most erudite Iranian women of 20th century. She was a writer, she was an essay, she was an educator. On her time, I essentially tried to create the Savak that was initially intended to be a combination of a tank tank, a police force, a security force, a counter intelligence force and an intelligence force. One of the first things he did, it banned all torture and tried to reconcile the Muhammad Raza Shaz regime with the opposition. So Pakravaan does something extraordinary with Khomeini. He treats his prisoner with dignity. He arranges for Khomeini to be housed in a guest villa, usually reserved for foreign diplomats. Over the summer of 1963, he even meets with Khomeini once a week for lunch and conversation. Many of himself acknowledge these talks in his writings. Pakravaan would listen to the cleric and then try to persuade him to steer clear of politics. If you enter politics, you will be corrupting Islam, he argues. Echoing the mainstream position of the Shia clergy in Khomeini, Khomeini of course disagrees. But it's important to note that this is a strategy of Pakravaan to learn as much as he could about this rival of the Shia and the man who would eventually go on to lead the Islamic Revolution. Now, Pakravaan never publishes views on these lunches, but a Harvard University oral history of the Shia's Iran features his wife Fatima Pakravaan's recollections. Here is what she says about what Pakravaan told her about his lunches with Khomeini several years later. "My husband told me, 'You know, I had lunch every week with Ayatollah.' And I said, 'Yes, I know that, but you never told me what was the atmosphere of these meetings.' And he said, 'Very good, very cordial, very friendly.' The Ayatollah used to say in this very flowery eastern way, dimzah, 'I count the days until we reach the day of our luncheon.' I asked, 'How was he?' And my husband said, 'He was very handsome and I'm sure he's not as old as they say. I'll tell you why, he was very handsome, yet extraordinary presence, a power of seduction, hit a great charisma.' I asked my husband, 'What was the object of your conversation with the Ayatollah? What did you talk about?' And he said, 'Well, about religion, about philosophy, about history.' I said, 'Is he a very learned man?' He said, 'Well, his religion I cannot say because I'm not a religious person, suppose he is because he is a specialist, but his ignorance in history and philosophy is something unbelievable.' He said, 'You know, the man who said America oppressed Iran for the last 25 years, 25 centuries.' My husband said, 'He is very, very, very ignorant.' I said, 'But what struck you in him? What did you find was the most striking aspect of his temperament or his character?' And he said, 'His ambition.' I said, 'I'm vision.' What do you mean ambition? What kind of ambition? Political? Religious?' He said, 'I couldn't find out because he's very secretive.' And he said, 'You know, you made my hair stand on end. It was frightening.' By August of 1963, Homan he was allowed to leave his villa. Takervon had advocated for his release with the hopes that he would tone things down, but Homan he continued his aggressive sermons against the Shah. This came to a head on November 4th, 1964. Homan had now begun to attack an agreement between America and Iran that stipulated any American arrested for crime in Iran would be tried in an American court. It's a fairly standard clause in packs that iron out the details of US-Basing Rights on foreign countries. For Homan he though, this was a betrayal of Iran's national honor. Here is what he said. They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of this state, no one will have the right to interfere with him. Well that was enough. This time the Shah would have to take a more drastic measure. That speech earned Homan he his exile. He sent the Ayatollah at first to Turkey, but he would end up in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. A few months later, he sacked Pakrubah from the Sivak. After the break, Homan he develops his political philosophy and the Shah throws the greatest party of the 20th century. This is what he said. For most of Iranian history, a radical cleric would need to preach his message in person to his followers. If the Mullah or Ayatollah is thousands of miles away, so much for that. Maybe one of his students can continue the struggle, but good luck. But Homan is a 20th century Ayatollah. And as such, he was an early innovator when it came to mass communication. He would record his sermons and his network of followers would distribute these tapes all over the country. And this strategy was already a play in the early 1960s during the Shah's white revolution. Even when Homan was arrested in 1963, the streets of Iran's major cities feature his recordings. I remember clearly in 1962, going with my mother to the Bazaar and he, the upper middle class, more or less modern woman, getting a tape of Khomeini and bringing it to the house and bringing one of my uncles who was a very prominent minister of the government to listen to these tapes. I saw firsthand the kind of. influence that it had at the time. So he was, in that sense, an innovator in the sense of organizing exactly at the time you're pointing to, we now know he helped organize a kind of a national network of phone connections between his supporters, where their only connection would be public street phones. They would exchange these numbers so that just ten years later, when he would send tapes from Paris and they would get suddenly distributed throughout Iran. We now know how they did it. Do it through this network of phones. He was very clever in using these technologies to his nefarious end. And here is Mousen Sonskara explaining how this strategy was employed in the 1978 revolution and a WNYC radio documentary. In that house we had an international line and a colleague in Iran who was an engineer in telecom of Iran. And he and his friends, they could open international line, one international line from Iran for us, like a collect call. But helping spread in this old school way came with major consequences as Kim Gareth explained to WNYC. And while these speeches were less diplomatic, less polished than the messages Mousen had been passing to the Western press. Again, this is Abbas Balani. They didn't mind whether the Iranians who were religious heard this message about an Islamic state because they thought, okay, it would bring them out onto the street. And it's never going to happen anyway. So let him say whatever he want because it's all crazy talk. So these messages went viral both in the early 60s and in the late 1970s. Millions of people heard them and it was hypnotic, partly because he spoke like an ordinary person, a casual dialect that wasn't polished, his power grew when Homanie called for strikes on these tapes they happened. And when he told people to take to the streets in these tapes it happened. And when he told the Shah to get the hell out of Iran, well, in 1979 he did. Now in the later part of the 1960s Homanie was relatively quiet. He was in Najaf, the most important seminary city for Shia Islam located in southern Iraq. And it was in Najaf, the Homanie began to write the lectures that became his book, Islamic government. This was in some ways comparable to out of Hitler's mind come in that it was a documented record of Homanie's plans for the future. Intended to replace Iran's model of constitutional monarchy with a state run by clerics and this theocracy would be devoted to destroying the Jewish state. Here is what Homanie writes in that book about the passage of the Quran that instructs Muslims to form governments that must prepare for war. If the Muslims had acted in accordance with this command and after forming a government made the necessary extensive preparations to be in a state of full readiness for war, a handful of Jews would never dare to occupy our lands and to burn and destroy the Masjid al-Aqsa without the people being capable of making an immediate response. All this has resulted from the failure of the Muslims to fulfill their duty of executing God's law and setting up a righteous and respectable government. If the rulers of the Muslim countries truly represented the believers and enacted God's ordinance, they would set aside their petty differences. Abandoned their subversive and divisive activities and join together like the fingers of one hand. Then a handful of rich Jews, the agents of America, Britain and the foreign powers, would never have been able to accomplish what they have, no matter how much support they enjoyed from America and Britain. All this has happened because of the incompetence of those who rule over the Muslims. It's worth noticing a few things here. Homanie is a shea-clarer, but he is now aping the message of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the original proponents of political Islam. That is the ideology that argues the secular leaders of the Islamic world have failed their peoples because they have strayed from the Quran. The consensus view of shea theologians in this period is that the Mullahs and Ayatollahs should not rule Muslim nations until the twelfth hidden Imam returns to earth. Homanie's mention for example of the Majid al-Aqsa is a direct lift from the first grandmoufti of Jerusalem, Hajjamin al-Husayni, whose stoke violent riots against Jews in Hebron in 1929, based on the lie that Jews sought to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque. The other point is that in this very Islamic approach to geopolitics, Homanie is also calling for the restoration of a lost empire. And though Homanie would find that the world's anti-imperialists lined up behind his revolution in 1979, Homanie was always an imperialist himself. When Islamic government came out in 1970, the shop banned its publication in Iran. Now this is understandable, Homanie wasn't outlaw at the time and his ideas were dangerous, but it was also a major blunder because the reforms of the white revolution were popular. Homanie's plans for Iran were widely debated and well known, perhaps many of the liberals and socialists who through their support behind him for the 1978 and 1979 revolution would have thought twice. But because this text remained relatively obscure in the run up to the revolution, at least in Iran, it was easier for the many factions opposed to the shop to delude themselves into thinking that Homanie would not seek real political power. And this brings us to the shop himself. By the end of the 1960s, Muhammad Reza Pallavi was becoming isolated from his own people. He enjoyed bedrock support from the American government that sold him the most advanced fighters, tanks and guns in the US arsenal. But many were beginning to notice the vast tassam between the rich and poor in Iran. Some economists estimated that half of the population lived below the poverty line, despite the land reforms which were meant to improve the lives of Iranian peasants, most still only survived on about $2 a day. So one way to understand why the American and European left in 1979 would end up treating Homanie as a democratic revolutionary leader is because he was replacing a selfish king. Even establishment liberals saw the Shah in the late 1960s as out of touch and delusional. Here is what former undersecretary of state George Ball had to say in his 1982 memoir about the Shah's ostentatious re-caronation of 1967. Nothing absurd pathetic spectacle, the son of a colonel and a Persian Kassak regiment play acting as the emperor of a country with an average per capita income of $250 per year, proclaiming his achievements in modernizing his nation while a coup d'ard in the Raymond and symbols of ancient despotism. A savvier monarch would have kept a lower profile when half his country were still living like peasants. But the Shah was a flauntor. In celebration of 2,500 years of nationhood, the Persian people led by their Shah, his imperial majesty Mohamed Reza Palavi Arya Mayor Shah and Shah, may come at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the first Shah of all, Cyrus King of Kings, championed long before Magna Carta of human rights and liberties. Cyrus, the lords anointed of the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament, Cyrus the founder of Persian culture and the father of Iran, the land, five times the size of Great Britain, which this Shah rules today. In solemnly dedicating himself to the memory of his predecessor, the Shah was keeping a promise he had made ten years earlier. We are now listening to a propaganda film commissioned by the Iranian government in 1971 to commemorate what has been described as the most expensive party of all time. That voice is none other than the legendary filmmaker and actor, Orson Wells. The film Flame of Persia commemorates the 2,500th anniversary of the coronation of Cyrus the Great, the first Shah in Iranian history, the founder of the accumulated Persian Empire. For this party, the Shah transformed the ancient capital of that empire, Persepolis, into a kind of desert resort. There was a parade of Iranian soldiers wearing the uniforms and sporting the weapons of past Iranian dynasties. The Shah imported 1,500 trees and tens of thousands of songbirds for the occasion. Guests were driven from Tehran in Red Mercedes limousines to this desert resort, and the tents themselves were designed by the Parisian firm of Massal Genshin and decked out in miles of imported silk and gold. The highlight was a five and a half hour banquet, catered by Maxine's of Paris, which featured a 70 meter long serpentine table for more than 60 heads of state and various kings and princes from the world's world families. The official toast was 1959 Don Périn-Young Rose. Here were some of the courses. Quill eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, roast lamb with truffles, roast pico- stuffed with foie gras, surbet over vieux champagnes, mohette, 1911. The total cost of this three day party has been a subject of controversy. After the revolution, the new regime claimed the Shah spent billions, but it's more likely the cost were more likely in the range of 200 to 400 million dollars, still a whopping sum. At the time, Barbara Walters asked the Shah about the extravagant cost. "You majesty, there are some people who feel that Iran should not be spending millions of dollars on this celebration." How they are still people in need. How do you answer these critics? And why do you think it was important to have this celebration? First of all, how do they know about what is spent? Really the only expenses that are made for the festivities are the two official dinners that we are going to give our guests. This is the least that we could do for such a gathering. Well, one can imagine the Ayatollah and exile licking his chops. On October 31, 1971, Khomeini issued a statement declaring the incompatibility of monarchy and Islam on the Shah's 2500th anniversary celebration while blaming a familiar enemy for this desecration. "I proclaim to the governments and heads of state that means to take part in this abominable festival, that it has no connection with the people of Iran, and that to participate in it is to participate in the murder of oppressed people of Iran. Let all Muslim heads of state take note in particular that this festival is anti-Islamic and that it is being arranged by Israeli experts and engineers. They should therefore shanol participation in it." Historians have debated the spark that lit the fuse of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, but at the very least this extravagance celebration of the Persian Empire of antiquity with its champagne toast and French catering, well, it wasn't the very least a precursor. After the break, the Shah loses his grip and the liberals fall in line. "Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, your majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you." That was President Jimmy Carter making one of the worst time speeches in the history of dinner toasts. It was New Year's Eve 1977. A little more than a week before the Islamic Revolution would begin. What made Carter's toast extraordinary is that the man had campaigned on a human rights first foreign policy and made his predecessors arm sales to Iran a campaign issue. This is a boss Malani again who was arrested for his political agitation two weeks before Carter was elected in 1976. And I was arrested two weeks before the American elections. That brought Jimmy Carter. And because Jimmy Carter was a possible winner, things were beginning to change in prison already. And Carter was elected in prison. I was in solitary confinement. The next day I knew he had won because changes began in prison. Changes began in our condition. Began to have soap in the bathroom, for example. Yes. Good watch, our hat. Following Mohammed Reza Shah and quote, "Island of stability harder dashed any hopes that the American president would press the Shah to liberalize his governing style. When reform is not an option, or drastic measures usually follow. In this environment, the Shah ordered the country's largest newspaper. It's a lot to run a prominent editorial accusing ito Khomeini being a British agent based on the fact that his grandfather once worked for the British Empire in Kashmir. It was a stretch no doubt. But the affront to Khomeini's reputation sparked protests in Khome among the seminary students who worshipped him and often made a pilgrimage to Najaf Iraq where he was exiled. After receiving President Carter's warm toast, the Shah ordered the Savak to crush those protests. The Savak came down hard, but the extent of their brutality is still disputed. On the lower range, five students were killed in the clashes with the secret police. Many supporters however put this number at 70. There is a particular feature of Shia Islam, the majority faith of Iran, that is hard on dictators. After a martyr is killed, there is a 40 day period of mourning, at the end of which is another round of public demonstrations. And on the 40th day, there were new demonstrations to commemorate the students slain on January 8th, 1978. This time, the demonstrations were all over the country and in particular, in the bustling city of Taparriese. And this time, there really was rioting. Banks and cinemas were burned. This time, the army and Savak seeking to quell the violence wound up killing at least 100. Harold Rode, a former Pentagon Middle East analyst, was a PhD student studying in Meshad Iran in 1978. And here is his recollection of the scene. With time, there were riots. Windows in the university were broken. No one would talk about what was going on here. But it began to be a bit dangerous. And at one point, the fellow students that I've been asking in a Houshier family grand Ayatollah. And they looked at me again with their so good looking faces. And they had no idea. Well, all of a sudden, these, and I began to list the names and it's important. Of six grand Ayatollahs that I knew. I knew. And I mentioned the Chomenei, the Ayatollah Chomenei, who had been thrown out of Iran by the Chaw about 15 years before and was living in Iran. I didn't know much about him, but I mentioned his name. And all the names that I mentioned, people just smiled as if I'm talking from another planet. Then as things, the situation began to deteriorate. My fellow students went out into the streets and were yelling, "Death to the Chaw, long live Chomenei." As the demonstrations in 1978 became more ferocious and violent, Chomenei used his network to distribute those cassettes of his sermons, putting the blame on the Chaw, even when his own side may have been insigators. The clearest example is from the summer of 1978. On August 19th, a group of arsonists locked the doors of cinema wrecks in Abadat and proceeded to light theater on fire. 400 people perished in the blaze. It was a disaster. The fire department was slow to arrive at the scene, and when they did, the hydrids didn't have water. To this day, it's unclear who the perpetrators were, although attacking cinemas had been a hallmark of Islamic terrorists in Iran since the 1940s. One might think this would be a wake-up call to liberals and leftists in the opposition movements to be wary of Romani and his movement, but the ayatola used the catastrophe to his advantage. You at least a tape of another sermon addressed to the people of Abadat. The evidence points to the criminal hand of the tyrannical regime, which wishes to distort the image of the human Islamic movement of our people, lighting a ring of fire around the cinema, and then having its doors locked by the cinema staff, was something only the authorities had the power to do. This worked. Iranians directed their rage, not at the mullows, but at the Shah, but more importantly, they did so at the urging of Romani. Now, it's important to say at this point that when the Iranian Revolution begins, the Exiled how many leads one? of many factions trying to unseat the Shah. But he is not yet the consensus leader of the movement. There are armed Marxist guerrilla fighters, old constitutionalists that were part of Muhammad Mosad as national front. The Kremlin aligned to Daaparti and followers of a sociologist named Ali Shari'arti who fused Shia Islam with socialism. Over time, however, most, but not all of the leaders of these factions enter into an alliance with Homanian. In some cases, this is a cynical calculation. Iran had never in its history been ruled as a theocracy. Homanian was an effective organizer and speaker. But he couldn't actually form a government many reasons. In other cases, they really believed Homanian as advisors when they promised that Islamism would only guide the democratic process and not consume and replace it. Again, this is a vast colony. So the official national front led by Sanjabi and Fuluhar did make peace with Homanian. The Iranian left almost unmask made peace with Homanian. Some of the Iranian feminists made peace with Homanian. But there were also Iranian woman writers, for example, who stayed very clear and said, "This, what is coming is a bad news." But unfortunately, the damage was done not by the ones who said that no, the damage was done by the ones who were fooled by Homanian and bought into this rhetoric. Some of them, some of the leftists, I think, and as far as I know, some of the Democrats, to the extent that I've had conversations with them, I've read their memoirs, they thought Homanian is so reactionary, he can't possibly rule Iran. So we'll use him as a banner, overthrow the Shah and then take over. So at this point, the Shah realizes he has to do something about Homanian, who has emerged as the voice and leader of this new revolution. He decides in October to ask Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, to exile Homanian and Saddam complies. This leads Homanian to a suburb of Paris, Nufla Leschetteau. He takes up residence in a modest home where he is surrounded by a coterie of younger advisors. What makes this a typical blunder is that the Shah, despite his pride in being a modernizer, fails to understand what the Ayatollah has long understood and immediately exploits. Though he may be cut off from the seminary students who had been making pilgrimages to study with him in Najaf since the late 1960s, he now has access to the international media and he proceeds to do 132 interviews with major newspapers and television networks between October of 1978 and January 1979. In this sense, he has the best of both worlds. On the outskirts of Paris, he becomes overnight the most accessible Iranian opposition figure for Western journalists, while his network back in Iran is distributing his cassette tapes all over the country. These interviews would take place with Homanian, now in his late 70s, sitting cross-legged underneath an apple tree, wearing his black robes, turban, and blue plastic sandals. Sometimes he would be snacking on yogurt. On the one hand, this was an extraordinary scoop for the reporters. Outside of the Middle East, Homanian was largely unknown. The Ayatollah's handlers carefully choreographed these interviews. One had to submit questions in advance, no follow-ups were allowed. The Ayatollah's aides provided translations, and this was all very deliberate. Their intention was to portray the leader of the revolution in Iran as a softer, moderate, even progressive figure. Homanian's book, Islamic Government, which justified the formation of an Islamic theocracy, like the one that exists today in Iran, well that book was widely available, but when asked by Western journalists, Homanian would talk about how Islam should guide democracy in the background, not replace it. To get a flavor of how these interviews went, this is a clip from Mike Wallace's interview with Homanian after he returns to Iran at the beginning of the hostage crisis in the fall of 1979. And if the Imam says, "He will not free the hostages," then what can be the answer? Well I'm not sure if I can get the answer because this was not in the question. Please ask him, I'm sure it's a very simple straightforward question. It's a very simple question. He's not even going to listen to it because it's not in the here. You see here that Mike Wallace can't even ask the most relevant question. So good for 60 minutes to show American viewers back then what this was really like behind the scenes, but many Western journalists just swallowed the spin hole. And it wasn't just the reporters. Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters shortly after Homanian's return to Iran that the Ayatollah will eventually be regarded as a saint. Then there was Richard Falk, a Princeton professor of international law, who met with Homanian during his exile outside of Paris. He took to the pages of The New York Times in February of 1979 to scold those who insisted that Homanian was a reactionary and a terrorist. To suppose that Ayatollah Khomanian's dissembling seems almost beyond belief, his political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him is fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly in happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisors is uniformly composed of moderate progressive individuals. The title of that op-ed is appropriately, quote, "trusting Homanian." Part of the problem is that almost none of the analysts at the State Department or the CIA ever read that seminal 1970 book, Islamic government. Because in that book, he makes his plans very clear. The aims of Iran's vast coalition of groups at the time was to restore the 1906 Constitution, empower the modulus that was defenestrated under the Shah and build a liberal republic. Well, it was steamrolled, as we now know, in part because Ayatollah Khomanian had a very different vision for how to organize Iran's regime. One writer who did read that book from 1970 was the historian Bernard Lewis. In 1978 and 1979, he warned as many people in Washington as he could that Khomanian's revolution would not lead to democracy. This is Rwel Mark Direct, a former CIA targeting officer on Iran, and a student of Lewis's. Bernard was in contact with several folks in Washington, trying to explain to them that the Ayatollah was not in Nigma to scholars who'd been looking at Iran and that he meant what he said in Islamic government. And that folks should be aware of that. And that it certainly seemed to him that Iran was on the cusp of actually getting a theocracy, which it had the Middle East had not seen in quite some time. And he received a great deal of opposition, particularly from the Iran desk officer at the State Department and the Iran desk at that time was quite an important office. That desk officer named Henry Pratt argued in internal cables that Lewis was relaying information that was false. And his interventions were driven by Bernard Lewis's own pro-Israel ideology. Well, it turned out that Lewis was entirely correct. Now, if there is one Western progressive who illuminates the emergence of this red-green alliance of sorts, this willingness to give every benefit of the doubt to the austere cleric at the head of the Iranian Revolution. It is French philosopher Michel Foucault. We covered an earlier episode of Breaking History on Edward Syed's Orientalism. In 1978, Foucault was at the peak of his influence. He was the postmodernist, who was revolutionizing universities with his withering critique of the Western Enlightenment and its values. In 1978, he is commissioned by two Italian newspapers to report on the Iranian Revolution unlike visitors to one of the Soviet Union's Potemian villages. He can't stop gushing. He has seen the past and it works. His first big dispatch is covering the aftermath of Black Friday, another violent confrontation between protesters in Tehran's J-Law Square and the Shah's military. At least 88 people were killed. Many observers might have noticed the panic in chaos, but Foucault sees a kind of political spirituality in the movement. In one dispatch he writes about how Shia Islam is a missing ingredient from the Western Revolutionary politics. The prospect of a government run by the dictates of a holy book is quote, "a luminous point on the horizon for Foucault." There are many things that are very interesting about all of this to start. Foucault is an openly gay man who reveled in the freewheeling group-sex culture of the gay underground in Western cities like San Francisco and New York. Did he bother to read the Iatola sermons on homosexuality? One wonders. But the other fascinating aspect of Foucault's surgery in Iran is that he is not necessarily fooled by Comanese embrace of political Islam. Understand what he wants to do and applaud. For Foucault, political Islam is bubbling with, quote, "spiritual energy." One thing must be clear by Islamic government, nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control. To me, the phrase Islamic government seemed to point to two orders of things. A utopia, some told me without any pejorative implication, an ideal, most of them said to me. At any rate, it is something very old and also very far into the future. An ocean of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it will be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distress of legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a fate in the creativity of Islam. Saver the following irony. Foucault was a major intellectual influence on Edward Said's book Orientalism, which critiqued how Western Imperial writers made Arabs, Muslims, and Easterners objects in their narratives and imposed their own Imperial agenda on their histories. While here is the great postmodern leftist philosopher who knows nothing about Iran, celebrating a reactionary cleric and his campaign to end his country's hopes for self-rule. Foucault even writes at one point that the West should refrain from imposing its feminist values on Iran. Again, this is a possible on it. What would you trust Foucault? What does Foucault know about Iran? There should be enamored of these intellectuals that Iran folks is a complicated country. You can't send anybody just because they have a fancy name to cover Iran. And Foucault was absolutely fooled like many Iranian intellectuals by the former New Redric. By the fall of 1978, the Shah was cooked. He began to flail and become despondent. At one point, he decides that he will join the revolution against him. I kid you not. He delivers a speech claiming to hear the voice of the people and proceeds to fire his government. He has his former prime minister arrested at one point and tries to pass him off as a fall guy. He had lost the people. Here is a revealing interview with a former journalist for a state-run newspaper from the British program TVI. This was broadcast on December 14, 1978. The Army at the moment is an army of occupation. It is an army that enjoys no support among the population. There are widespread reports of passive defiance, even mutiny. Officers being shocked by soldiers, so on and so forth. It is, as you know, very difficult to corroborate these reports these days. It is not easy at all. But the truth is, when you have, as I believe, 3 million people, you say 2 million people, walk around, enter Iran and give the regime a vote of no confidence, you cannot keep the army away from this current, from this wave. It was all too late. On January 16, 1979, Shah departed with his family in service from Tehran's Maribot Airport, carried with him a small while of Iranian soil. Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the news broke. The Shah had gone. It was like liberation day. Marshall Mothosoges trapped in traffic, were showered with schools of flowers and kisses. The same soldiers who were accused of murders of massacres and atrocities in trying to keep the Shah in power. A newspaper with the headline, "Shah Leaves" was in the streets within minutes of his departure. Two weeks later, on February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomayni returned from his exile, stone-based and triumphant. He was mobbed at the airport by Jubilant Grounds. This was truly a revolution. A caretaker government under Shah Por Bhaktiar, a former member of most of his nationalist front, was completely ineffective. The Ura Kratz refused to open government agencies for his ministers. Khomayni appointed his own privy council, who had the real power, the first targets for the feminists, Iranian women, who wanted the same rights as men. Khomayni came back to Iran on February 1, 1st of February 1979. This is Matthias Kunkel, political scientist who has written extensively on the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Only some days later, on February 27, he repealed the law that had allowed women to seek a divorce. So let me give you this example with women rights at that time. On March 3, women were prohibited from serving as Yatges. On March 4, Khomayni declared that only men could initiate a divorce, soon after he ordered women to cover their heads with a veil. On March 9, women were expelled from all sport clubs and their Olympic team. Subsequently, the female age of marriage was again lowered to 9 and the value of a woman's testimony to a court made half-set of a man. So this was very clear what is going on in Tehran at that time. And there was a last big demonstration on March 6 of the women against these development, but in vain, many in the left, in the west and left, still supported Khomayni and the Islamic Revolution. None of this should be surprising to anyone who had followed Khomayni's rise to power. This is the same person who demanded that the Shah only allow men to vote for his state of reforms during the White Revolution who agitated against Khomangling of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the late 1950s, but it was all real now. The Revolution was now entering its Jacobin phase. Even though Khomayni's emissaries promised the military and Savak leader's immunity in the fall of 1978, if they did not fire on protesters, this promise turned out to be a lie. One by one, the Shah's former ministers, secret police officers and generals were rounded up and placed before the revolutionary tribunal of a sociopathic judge named Sadika Helchali. In short trials with no droids, the penalty was death. The victims would be shot in the back of the neck, then their lifeless bodies would be riddled with more bullets. The corpse would then be photographed and the picture would appear in the newspapers the next day. One of the first victims of this revolutionary justice was Hassan Pokhraban, the former Savak director, who helped persuade the Shah to spare Khomayni's life when he was arrested in 1963 and had those lunches with him throughout that summer. When Pokhraban asked the judge to explain the charges against him, spreading corruption on earth, the judge responded, "It is what you are guilty of." And with that, Pokhraban was murdered with a shot to his neck. This trial lasted 15 minutes. By the fall of 1979, it was clear to most Iranians and Americans at least that Khomayni was a monster. This is when the hostage crisis began. This after-Holchali's tribunals had sentenced scores of former regime officials to death. Khomayni's nasty side is best illustrated in an interview with a legendary Italian journalist, Oriana Follacci. In Kome, Iran in September 1979, Follacci's slender and intense sits across from the architect of Iran's revolution, Ayatollah Khomayni. One of the few western journalists who was not conned by his handlers. Her hand shakes a little as she puts down the tape recorder and hits record. What you are about to hear is a reenactment of that interview. Take from the transcript. I met up the interview and who served as translators. Miss Fulcgi, Barefoot, and Valtanacidor, the head to toe veiled the Muslim woman, was seated on a carpet when the Iatval entered the taped interview began. Forgive me if I insist, imam komaini. I meant that today in Iran, you raised fear and many people call you a dictator. The new dictator, the new boss, the new master. How do you comment on that? Does it say the new or don't you care? On the one hand, I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, it hurts me because it is unjust and a human to call me a dictator. On the other hand, I could care less because I know that weakness is a part of a human nature. And such weakness comes from our enemies, considering the road that we have chosen, a road that is opposed to the support powers. It is normal that the servants of foreign interests treat me with their poison and hurt all kinds of calamities against me. Nor do I have any illusions that those countries which are accustomed to plundering and looting us will stand by silently and idly. Oh, the mercenaries of the Shaz say lots of things, even that Khomeini ordered the brists of women to be cut off. Tell me, since you are here, did you have any evidence that Khomeini could commit such a monstrous act, that he would cut off the brists of women? No, I did not, imam, but you frighten people, as I said. And even this mob which calls your name is frightening. What do you feel? Hearing them calling out like this day and night, knowing that they are there, all of them they are sitting for hours, being shoved about, suffering just to see you for a moment and to sing your praises. I enjoyed hearing and seeing them, because they are the same ones who rose up and throughout the internally and external enemies, because their uploads is the continuation of the cry which the usurper was thrown out. It is good that they continue to be agitated, because the enemies have not disappeared. Until the country has settled down, the people must remain fired up, ready to march and attack again. In addition, this is love, an intelligent love. It is impossible not to enjoy it. Love or fanaticism? It seems to me that this is fanaticism. And of the most dangerous kind, I mean fascist fanaticism. In fact, there are many who see a fascist threatening around today and who even maintain that fascism is already being consolidated in Iran. Goes on in a probing way. At one point when Homanie suggested she didn't have to wear the hijab she was wearing if she found it so objectionable, but what she famously responded. That's very kind of you. I'm going to take off this stupid medieval rag right now. Well, she was clearly a brave woman, but it is obvious she really pushes her luck. Homanie is annoyed in this next section towards the end of their exchange. But the airplane that brought you back to your country is a product of the West. Even the telephone that you use to communicate with from Kjome. Even the television set that you so often use to convey messages to the country. Even this air conditioner which permits you to remain cooling this desert. If we are so corrupt and so corrupting, why do you use our heavy tools? Because these are the good things from the West and we are not afraid to use them and we do. We are not afraid of your science and your technology. We are afraid of your ideas and your customs which means that we fear you politically and socially. And we want this to be our country. We do not want you to interfere anymore in our politics and our economy. In our habits, our affairs and from now on we will go against anyone who tries to interfere. From the right or from the left, from here or from there. And now that's enough. Go away. Go away. The fever devotion of Idle of Homanie's followers made a lasting impression on Oriana Fulacchi. So intense was their zeal. After her interview with him, they mobbed her. The encounter itself became a turning point in her career. While she acknowledged Homanie's intelligence and even described him. The most striking elderly man I had ever met. She also saw him as a danger. Fulacchi predicted that his influence would extend far beyond Iran. Warning that his movement could. Pause on the world. The Islamic Republic, Homanie created, did end up poisoning the world. Iran's new regime created Hezbollah. The Islamofashist militia that until last year had taken over Lebanon, conducted terror attacks all over the world, and waged a missile war against northern Israel. Iran is responsible for funding the confessional militias that stoked the civil war in Iraq in the 2000s and 2010s. It funded and guided the Houthi terrorists to have taken over half of Yemen. Iran's support of Bashar al-Assad turned the tide of his war against his own people, a war that killed at least 600,000 and sent millions into exile. And of course, Homanie's Islamic Republic became the most important patron of Hamas, the authors of October 7th. Homanie was able to rally the support of the Western world's anti-imperialists, only to pursue a vicious kind of imperialism in the Middle East. His revolution was enabled and empowered by deception. He told the Shah's army and secret police that there would be no reprisals if they did not fire on crowds in the last stages of the revolution. He told gullible Western journalists that he believed in democracy for Iran under Islamic guidance, and his heirs are still up to their old tricks. When Iran was saving Assad's tyranny in Syria, its envoys were wooing Barack Obama's diplomats, persuading them, that Iran could keep its nuclear infrastructure if it promised not to use it to build a bomb. Today, Homanie's heirs have found new suckers, this time on the right to go with the old ones on the left. Many Americans are afraid of Iran. You say you're not afraid, but Americans are afraid of Iran, and they believe that Iran would like to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. They see video of Iranians saying death to America describing our country as the great Satan. What is your opinion of that? Should we be afraid of Iran? I believe that this is a very wrong impression that anybody might have of Iran or the Iranians. I would like to remind you that Iran has never invaded another country in the last 200 years. When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to the people of the United States, or even to the officials of the United States. They mean death to crime, death to killing and foreignage, death to supporting killing others. Yes, why would Americans fear a regime that routinely chance death to America? Supplied insurgents with the roadside bombs, that killed and maimed thousands of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least Comanies Marks in 1978 had never actually seen a modern Islamic republic before. The bloody history that followed the fall of the Shah was still unwritten. Today, the useful dunces have no excuse. As nearly 50 years of Iranian theocracy has shown, Comanies ideology, political Islam itself, is incompatible with democracy and our way of life. How many civilians will have to die from Iranian-supported terror? How many distance will have to be tortured in the Islamic Republic's dungeons? For this message, to finally sink it. The happy just a second taste, in this father, you dealt with age, for just a take-up, for tetrahedra call. Congratulations, you've been resolved to take the nation. With dynamar, you told the soldiers you've been drugged. The eye of Zola, you went and stayed inside the barracks. You sent your dues, I sought scare of you. You stole the raven duchun, now give it back. You stole the raven duchun, we'd call the law. How many has the quenched shun will be enough? We came into the streets, we shall sad, we wanted to be brief. But now we have the hat, the sin of us above our journalists and prison. The mooters for terror, our arrested politicians. You promised rule of law, democracy and job, but you've been out of home and power at your heart. You said you would respect the rebel coalition, that hanging by the necks, or running in the prison. You promised a constitution, once up with that. You stole the raven duchun, just like the thug. And the has the quenched shun will be enough. You paid our pets, you gave it dancing, but you do respect your job and mass. You gave us modest, please still I'm done and watch you start it. You said we'd do our act to fight, but here at home we have no right. Da, da, da, da, da, you're dirty deep, you wreck the path to the chun. I do you sleep. Go, go, go, go, go, go, shout, we all believe you. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you like this episode, if you learn something, if you disagreed with something, or if it's simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a five star rating in a nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content at vfp.com. Please become a subscriber today, and until then, I'll see you next time. Bye.