By Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
From its very beginnings in Makkah and in Yathrib/ Medina at the end of the 6th and the first quarter of the 7th centuries, Islam in its many historical and religious transformations had been in permanent wars with itself and with the entire non-Islamic world. Upon his death in 632 AD, Muhammad left a legacy of destructive intolerance and even lethally violent hatred clothed in unreligious megalomaniac self-deification, which utterly lacked self-control as well as the intellectual ability needed to differentiate between the extreme degrees of good and evil. The catastrophic results of all these mental and moral aberrations had been that his followers, with rare exceptions, had led double lives – one for the non-Muslim world, before whom they had emphasized the human aspects of their religion, and a totally different one within their communities, where they had committed untold monstrosities in the name of Allah. This basic conundrum had cemented a ubiquitously inhuman culture, in which the saying “what is ordained by Allah cannot and shall not be avoided,” had led to politically, economically, and culturally arrested developments.
In the former Persia and the present Iran, the state religion since 1501 has been the Twelver Shi’ism – one of Islam’s mainstream orthodoxies. Its foundational doctrine is the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali – the grandson and the only direct biological descendant of Muhammad – by the hands of the Muslim ruler of Damascus the Umayyad Yazid I at Karbala on October 10, 680 AD. Consequently, for Shi’a Muslims, Karbala became the core symbol of their theology, the shining example of righteous resistance, and the authentic definition of martyrdom. Historically, from this foundational bereavement, Shi’a Muslims have spoken the language of “Martyrdom” and have acted according to the religious cum political commandment of “Permanent Revolution.” As a result, Shi’ites have historically excelled in starting violent revolutions which regularly ended in exterminatory defeats.
The post- World War II global political campaign of decolonialization was a fast and often violent process that comprised a moral critique of oppressive “Capitalist” powers, the “Oppressed” righteous resistance, and the Soviet Union’s inspired “transformative identity politics.” Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was a child of this “blind hatred” era of the 20th century. In his youth, he studied at Qom and became a respected scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, reflecting mainstream Shi’a clerical culture of the time. In the 1960s, he broke with “Shi’a Quietism” and rose against Mohammad Reza Shah, asserting that the latter is a tyrant, subservient to foreign powers, and being illegitimate under Islamic rule. Arrested and exiled to Najaf, Iraq, in 1964, he moved to a suburb of Paris, France, on October 6, 1978. Here, he refined his revolutionary idea of “Velayat-e Faqih” – meaning the direct rule of the Islamic jurist in the absence of the Allah-anointed sovereign Messiah called the Hidden Imam. Returning to Tehran on February 1, 1979, he abolished the monarchy and declared Iran an Islamic Republic. In the following decade, he installed himself as the “Supreme Leader,” centralized power under his authority and ordered the mass executions of his opponents. During and after the Iraq-Iran war in the early 1980s, he made the martyrdom culture absolute and concomitantly began to build his pro-Islamic Republic terrorist networks across the globe. Moreover, to prove his “Revolutionary” credentials, he ordered the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, taking 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. In this context, he popularized the epithets “Great Satan” (USA) and “Little Satan” (Israel), in which he meant all out wars against both countries in a speech on November 5, 1979.
His legacy has survived his demise in 1989. By redefining Shi’ism as an anti-imperialist political ideology, Khomeini’s Islamic Leninism, called Mullahcracy, is nothing but the sanctification of the immorality of hatred, the ideological mentality of violence, and the theologization of Terrorism. In this manner, Khomeini and his just deceased successor Seyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei turned Islam against Islam. More importantly, the battle cry of “total victory or martyrdom” has nothing to do with political and military strength. It is the quintessential phenomenon of the politicization of a culture that knows no peace, no tolerance, and no empathy for the rest of the world at large. Thus, pure and simple, Khomeini’s Mullahcracy gave false religious legitimacy to the destructive Leninist cum Stalinist egregious political correctness.
Now, days after the military elimination of the great part of the Iranian Mullahcracy by the joint American-Israeli military operation, the most important truth is that there is no diplomatic solution for Iran’s present as well as future misery under the leadership of the remnants of this Mullahcracy. The reason is simple: the fundamental objectives of the opposing parties are mutually incompatible. Iran seeks strategic supremacy in the greater Middle East. The United States of America, Israel and all the Arabs states want regional stability by rendering permanent confrontation or endless wars obsolete. The illusion that a comprehensive diplomatic breakthrough remains possible is comforting, but misleading. It treats this protracted instability as a policy dispute. In fact, it is an irreconcilable conflict over legitimacy and security architecture. The unacceptable risk Western politicians would continue to defend is that diplomacy could succeed, until expectations will outrun reality and a new lethal escalation will fill the vacuum.
Therefore, the ultimate objective is not diplomatic resolution through “strategic patience.” The goal is to present a viable alternative to Khomeini’s religious, moral, and political abnormalities. His Mullahcracy has never been based on popular consent. From this perspective, American policy must prioritize four objectives. First, the uncompromising exclusion of the Mullahcracy’s elite. Second, the thorough annihilation of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Corps as well as the Basij. Third, absolute support for the free reemergence of Iran’s civil society without illusions of rapid transformation. Fourth, the organization of a national referendum on whether the people favor a constitutional monarchy or a republic. Thus, instead of engineering regime change from the outside, the creation of a legitimate government must be facilitated from the inside. Iran’s future is progress toward a genuine democracy. Allowing this future to be the repetition of past Iranian historical failures is detrimental to everybody’s interests.