I am sharing this piece for readers interests. It covers a lot of the events in Iran since the overthrow of Mossadegh by a coup backed by the US and UK and the installation of the murderous regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. I am old enough to remember the protests in London against the Shah's regime by Iranian students and exiles. The Shah's secret police Savak was a notorious barbaric force that was known for its torture and killing even of families of dissidents abroad. The students most often wore masks or scarves to hide their identity for this reason. RM. Admin
Theo Horesh
The recent protests in Iran resulted from Israel’s deliberate attack on its infrastructure, which dealt a blow to its economy; the western reenactment of sanctions, which dealt an even bigger blow; and the coordinated social media campaign, bolstered by Israeli bots, of their former dictator’s son, who has been a steadfast supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s attack on infrastructure, and the sanctions carried out on its behalf, caused Iran’s currency to crash, and this led to the frustrations that made the protests possible. In this way, the protests were deliberately fomented by economic warfare against the people of Iran, whose lives are being destroyed by it. Thus, whatever their legitimate frustrations with the regime, protesters should blame Israel and the United States for their economic hardships.
But a would be king has channeled those frustrations with the help of the very same powers who lit their savings on fire.
The demonstrations have been coordinated by Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s former dictator. Pahlavi literally set the time for the initial protests on his social media accounts. “Long live the King,” “This is the last battle, Pahlavi will return,” and such calls for a dictator have constituted a substantial portion of the chants. Meanwhile, opinion polls suggest that support for the creation of a secular republic just barely outpaces calls for a constitutional monarchy, with support for both together totaling a little less than 50 percent across multiple opinion polls.
The calls for Pahlavi’s return are laughable given that he has never actually participated in Iranian politics, having left the country when he was just 18 at the time of the revolution. And he recently supported Israel’s attack on Iran, which devastated its infrastructure, paving the way for the protests he initiated. So, his commitment to the people of Iran is dubious at best. Meanwhile, his ties to Israel suggest they have helped him coordinate every dimension of the protests.
He met with Israeli officials shortly before the outbreak of the protests. They have advised him on taking back the country. They have coordinated a bot driven social media campaign to improve his image, according to Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz. He was frequently seen with Sheldon Adelson, the biggest donor to pro-Israel American candidates, and frequently fundraises among wealthy Zionist donors. And just a few months ago on his Twitter account, Pahlavi announced an “Israeli partnership” for economic development, as reported in the Jerusalem Post.
All of this can be easily dredged up with abundant sources through pointed questioning of AI about his ties to Israel.
In a move that can only be compared with an American presidential candidate, with zero political experience, swimming in Russian and Chinese cash, calling on their oligarchs to donate to his political action committees, Pahlavi even called on Israelis to donate to Iranian causes within the country. But this isn’t really a fair comparison, because neither Russia nor China have recently attacked the United States. Nor have they destroyed its economy, as Israel and the United States have with Iran. And they have never installed a dictator in the US, as America did with Reza Pahlavi’s father in 1953, when it paid demonstrators to foment a coup against Iran’s democratically elected liberal prime minister, Mohamed Mosadegh, because he nationalized the country’s oil.
As a close ally of Israel, the Shah has been largely immune from serious criticism in the United States, where a virtual cottage industry dedicated to overthrowing the Islamic Republic has arisen. So, it is easy to get the impression that the so-called monarchy, which was removed from power in 1979, practiced a kind of enlightened liberalism, which granted greater personal freedom without the voting rights.
But the Shah’s human rights record was “the worst globally,” according to Amnesty International’s Secretary General in 1975—the worst, amid the Guatemalan Genocide, South African Apartheid, the Argentine Junta, which disappeared 30,000, and the Pinochet regime in Chile, which used to sew live rats into the vagina’s of women critical of the regime—all armed by Israel, as was Iran, incidentally.
Amnesty reported that the Shah had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world;” that he held 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners, the highest per capita rate anywhere in the world; and that the torture practiced upon them was “beyond belief.” Compare that with the roughly 15,000 political prisoners today, in a population 2.8 times larger than in 1975, and it turns out that, if we take the midpoint of the Shah’s widely cited prisoner count, the per capita rate of imprisonment for political offenses under the Shah was 12 times greater than the current regime. Even if Amnesty’s typically conservative figures were a wild exaggeration, this could hardly be conceived of as a better climate for human rights.
While many of the current protesters are undoubtedly in the streets risking their lives for freedom, and while I have spent substantial time fighting for their freedom online, the facts suggest that the protests they are participating in are part of a coordinated foreign attack on their state—almost exactly like that of Pahlavi’s father, only more sophisticated and intense this time. The conditions for it have been carefully set by what is arguably the most Islamophobic state in the world and the most murderous regime of our time, operating through an agent who seeks to re-establish a notoriously savage dictatorship.
That may be all well and good to many who are out in the streets, but the United States shattered Libya and Iraq with far better intentions than anyone imagines Israel or Trump to possess. Never mind the fact that the Shah’s regime was renowned for being one of the most unequal in the world, that the diaspora monarchists fueling support for these protests spring from the elites of that regime, and that many could profit handsomely with a return to it. Never mind that elections for the weak presidency in Iran have been about as competitive as those in the United States, and that Iran is maintaining a critical balance of power, however slight, to the Nazis of our time in Israel, who in the last two years alone have invaded eight nations, stolen huge tracts of land from three, and committed genocide against one in what is increasingly the forgotten wasteland of G•za.
The Islamic Republic of Iran requires a complete overhaul to express the genuine aspirations of its people. But that is unlikely to come from the son of a dictator, backed by a state that would just as happily see all of his compatriots dead, just so they might more quickly move on to the next victim. And it is takes total naïveté to think that Netanyahu and Trump might initiate a democratic transition in Iran, when they have identified the dictator they need to end resistance to Israel.
Let us hope no more Iranians corrupt their cause by trying to make an ally of the devil, who would just as soon eat them for lunch.
America’s support for the genocide in Gaza under both major parties should serve as a reminder of its long history of destroying nations through its interventions—that is, if we have forgotten Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, the Congo, Chile, and let us not forget Iran itself. But unlike Israel, the United States has also aided in the development of several states. Israel has never helped liberate another people, never helped them build a democratic state, never lifted a country out of poverty, and never stopped a civil war. The idea that such a rogue state would do so now for a people whose lives they have destroyed, through the sanctions that were enacted on their behalf, is simply absurd.
Iranians deserve better, and the last thing the world needs is another vicious dictator, who is happy to see the economy of his people destroyed, and to risk their lives in the attack of a sociopathic state, in alliance with the Third Reich of our time, just to grab the ring and wield his power with the killers of children.
~ Theo Horesh is the author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
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