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- [00:00]
Eli Lake
Welcome back to Breaking History. In the last episode, we explored the prelude to Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty. In this episode, we examine the life of the cleric who helped lead that revolution. His name was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and he ended 2,500 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.
- [00:44]
Abbas Milani
Today's model Lee Harvey Oz, Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again when Newsom kids are mystery.
- [01:12]
Eli Lake
How can we help make stronger communities happen? Well, at JPMorgan Chase, we invest in what's working because when businesses can grow.
- [01:20]
Abbas Milani
That growth means more jobs for more people and more goods that can go to more restaurants and main streets and schools in the communities we love. Make the green grass grow all around.
- [01:30]
Eli Lake
All around make the green grass grow.
- [01:31]
Abbas Milani
Grass grow all around make momentum happen. Learn more@jpmorganchase.com impact.
- [01:38]
Eli Lake
Cutting off military funding.
- [01:40]
Abbas Milani
For a government that is starving 2.
- [01:42]
Eli Lake
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, is going to be no more military aid for Israel.
- [01:52]
Abbas Milani
So there will just will have to be a shift. And I do think that will mean.
- [01:55]
Eli Lake
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 poll Israelis, they say they want a fucking ceasefire.
- [02:03]
Abbas Milani
Israelis want the hostages returned through a negotiated settlement.
- [02:06]
Eli Lake
And by the way, that's the way.
- [02:08]
Abbas Milani
In which the vast majority of hostages who were returned were able to be returned.
- [02:12]
Eli Lake
We just heard from the former Obama speechwriters on their popular Pod Save America podcast, making the case against the US Israel Alliance. No Democrat should take AIPAC 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 damn 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 pogrom 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 7th. But over time, he too became concerned about the intensity of of Israel's war efforts.
- [03:43]
Abbas Milani
Those protesters out in the street, they have a point.
- [03:46]
Eli Lake
A lot of innocent people are being killed to 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 7th. Hamas is evil or they started the war. Nonetheless, their arrows today in 2025 are aimed at 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, but unless there is a ceasefire that ends the war, this is the moment to act so today, as part of this process towards peace.
- [04:45]
Abbas Milani
I can confirm the 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, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of.
- [05:08]
Eli Lake
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 7th. Terrorism works, guys. The peace process was dormant on October 6th, 2023. Not even two years later, the 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 re establish the caliphate of the first Islamic empire of the 8th and 9th 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 terrorists. 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 Gazan 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 it 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 belligerents 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 2,500 years of Iranian kings. How could the champions of women's rights and democracy find themselves cooperating in the birth of Islamic fascism for Iran? After the break, we find out.
- [08:22]
Abbas Milani
Congratulations.
- [08:23]
Eli Lake
You prove us all your declination. Put down the arms. You told the soldiers you can trust.
- [08:32]
Abbas Milani
The iron donut and when they stayed.
- [08:35]
Eli Lake
Inside their barracks, you set your goons outside the scarab. You stole the revolution, now give it back. You promised constitution then took it back. You stole the revolution.
- [08:57]
Abbas Milani
We call it love.
- [09:00]
Eli Lake
How many have the Cuban shun will be enough. We came into the streets with the shy side. We wanted to be free. But now we have to hide the sin of us above the journalists in prison, the mullahs but to ride our arrested polit.
- [09:31]
Abbas Milani
Iran is a country of recurring earthquakes and in 1960 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 on 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 Shah's 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 Shah's plans for the emancipation of the nation's women. Rioting against this program was led by leaders of a strict Muslim sect opposed to women's suffrage.
- [10:24]
Eli Lake
We are listening 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 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi'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 Mohamed mosadda back in 1953. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi 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 authorized 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 unsure monarch who had to be persuaded by his own family and a parade of US officials to fire Mossadegh 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 Mossaddad, 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 land reform aspect has different phases 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 Ray Takei, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the Last Job. 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.
- [13:09]
Abbas Milani
Forth, but it remains, even by the.
- [13:11]
Eli Lake
Acknowledgment of the Islamic Republic itself, substantial amount of land was transferred. It had other element to it, as you mentioned, women's franchise, the ability to vote in elections.
- [13:21]
Abbas Milani
And it had other aspect to it.
- [13:25]
Eli Lake
Shaw created a whole core, the health core, the literacy core. And you began to see all these people going to villages. And when you essentially sent illiteracy corps 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 had consequences. And those consequences took the form of a particularly austere and radical Ayatollah. We know him as Ruhollah 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 dilettante. Remember, the second Pahlavi 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 Pahlavi, 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 Fazayad 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 fate 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.
- [15:21]
Abbas Milani
You miserable wretch. 45 years of your life have passed. Isn't it time for you to think and reflect A little to ponder about where all this is leading you, to learn a lesson from the experience of your father. If what they say 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 impure animal? 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 pure animals? I hope to God that you did not have in mind the ulama and the religious scholars when you said the reactionaries 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 won't be able to go on living. The nation will not allow you to continue this way.
- [16:35]
Eli Lake
Khomeini had been delivering speeches like this for months. But this one crossed a line. He was now personally attacking the Iranian leader. He called him a miserable wretch, for God's sake, and all but threatened his life. How did it get to this? Why didn't the Shah nip his Khomeini 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 mullahs could be political figures, but for the most part, the clerisy did not concern itself with governing by the dictates of Shia Islam. This quietist 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 mullah, Jamal Al Din Isfahani, railing against excessive price controls on sugar. Prime Minister Mossadegh 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 Qom 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 prophesize his demise and insult him personally. So on June 5, the Shah sent his savak to the Fazayed seminary again. In Qom. Their mission Arrest Ayatollah Khomein. It seemed like his followers were waiting for it, because when word spread of the arrest, tens of thousands of of Khomeini's followers flooded the streets of Tehran like a medieval band of looting 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. Martial law was declared in Tehran. The army sent personnel carriers with soldiers to the entrance of the bazaar along with fire trucks and police vans. 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 dissonance 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 seethed at the popularity of Western movies and public dancing. Add to this, Khomeini is also a proponent of terrorism.
- [19:40]
Abbas Milani
Khomeini was a radical Islamist long before he became the Khomeindi that we know today.
- [19:47]
Eli Lake
This is Abbas Milani, historian and the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.
- [19:54]
Abbas Milani
In 1945, for example, Islamist terrorist by the name of Nabwa Safavi emerges on the scene, kills one of Iran's most prominent secular intellectuals called Kasavi, and the Grand Ayatollah of the time. The most influential ayatollah probably in 20th century Shiism, Ayatollah Burrudi bans Safavi from all seminaries. He says this guy is a troublemaker. One of the only clergy who defies Burjardi secretly, but pampers and protects Nawab Esfavi. The terrorist is Khomeini.
- [20:34]
Eli Lake
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 that 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 Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, a text that is still revered by campus radicals more than 60 years later and inspired the more secular Yasser Arafat. To form a Palestine Liberation Organization. Well, 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 3, 1963 sermon that got him arrested.
- [21:29]
Abbas Milani
Israel does not wish the Quran to exist in this country. Israel doesn't wish the Ulema to exist in this country. Israel does not wish a single learned man to exist in this country. It was Israel that assaulted Faiziya Madrasa by means of its sinister agents. It is still assaulting us and assaulting you, the nation. It 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 it regards as blocking its path.
- [22:10]
Eli Lake
This was not merely a lie. The SAVAK raided the Fawzaya mosque, not Israel, but conspiratorial Western antisemitism grafted onto radical Islamic. Accusing Israel of seeking to destroy the Quran is 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 maybe 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 Pokravan. 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 Pakravan was NAMED DIRECTOR In 1963, he implemented real reforms again. This is Abbas Milani.
- [23:49]
Abbas Milani
Hasan Pagravan was director. He was the deputy director first and then director. He was a very erudite man, had extensive connections with the Iranian intelligentsia. His mother is clearly one of the most erudite Iranian women of 20th century. She was a writer, she was an essayist, she was an educator. And he came and essentially tried to create the Sabakh that was initially intended to be a combination of a think tank, a police force, a security force, a counter intelligence force and an intelligence force. And one of the first things he did, it banned all torture and tried to reconcile Mohammad Reza Shah's regime with the opposition.
- [24:35]
Eli Lake
So Pochravan 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. Khomeini himself acknowledged these talks in his writings. Pokrovan 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 Qom. Now, Khomeini, of course, disagrees. But it's important to note that this is a strategy of Pokravan to learn as much as he could about this rival of the Shah and the man who would eventually go on to lead the Islamic revolution. Now, Pochravan never published his views on these lunches, but a Harvard University oral history of the Shah's Iran features his wife Fatima Pokravan's recollections. Here is what she says about what Pakravan 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, Timza, I count the days until we reach the day of our luncheon. I asked, how was he? 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. He had extraordinary presence, a power of seduction. He had a great charisma. I asked my husband, what was the object of your conversation with the Ayotolla? 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. You know the man who said, you know the man who said, America oppressed Iran for the last 25 years, 25 centuries. My husband said, he's 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, ambition? What do you mean, ambition? What kind of ambition? Political, religious? He said, I couldn't find out because he's very secretive. Then he said, you know, he made my hair stand on end. It was frightening. By August of 1963, Khomeini was allowed to leave his villa. Pokravan had advocated for his release with the hopes that he would tone things down. But Khomeini continued his aggressive sermons against the Shah. This came to a head on November 4, 1964. Khomeini had now begun to attack an agreement between America and Iran that stipulated any American arrested for a crime in Iran would be tried in an American court. It's a fairly standard clause in pacs that iron out the details of US basing rights on foreign countries. For Khomeini, though, this was a betrayal of Iran's national honor. Here is what he said.
- [27:46]
Abbas Milani
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 the state, no one will have the right to interfere with him.
- [28:16]
Eli Lake
Well, that was enough. This time, the Shah would have to take a more drastic measure. That speech earned Khomeini his exile. He sent the Ayatollah at first to Turkey, but he would end up in the Iraqi holy city of Najif. A few months later, he sacked Pokrabahn from the the Savak. After the break, Khomeini develops his political philosophy and the Shah throws the greatest party of the 20th century. Hey there, Eli. Here. If you're enjoying breaking history, you're probably interested in how power really operates in America and who is behind it. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast On Notice, produced by the nonpartisan newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reece Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations, not just about the latest headlines, but also what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the United States. Reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations you won't hear in traditional interviews. Tune in to On Notice. That's Notice spelled N O T U S. It's available every Monday wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Exiling Khomeini was the kind of thing earlier shahs of different dynasties would have done with a meddlesome ayatollah. 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 Khomeini 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 at play in the early 1960s during the Shah's white revolution. Even when Khomeini was arrested in 1963, the streets of Iran's major cities featured his recordings.
- [30:58]
Abbas Milani
I remember clearly in 1962, going with my mother to the bazaar and she very sort of 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. So 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 15 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. So he was very clever in using these technologies to his nefarious end.
- [32:10]
Eli Lake
And here is Mohsen Sasgara explaining how this strategy was employed in the 1978 revolution in a WNYC radio documentary.
- [32:21]
Abbas Milani
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.
- [32:39]
Eli Lake
Iran for us, like a collect call. But helping spread in this old school way came with major consequences, as Kim Gattis explained to wnyc.
- [32:51]
Abbas Milani
And while these speeches were less diplomatic, less polished than the messages Mohsen had.
- [32:57]
Eli Lake
Been passing to the Western press, again, this is Abbas Malani. They didn't mind whether the Iranians who were religious heard this message about an.
- [33:08]
Abbas Milani
Islamic state, because they Thought, okay, it.
- [33:11]
Eli Lake
Would bring them out onto the street and it's never going to happen anyway.
- [33:13]
Abbas Milani
So let him say whatever he want.
- [33:15]
Eli Lake
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 Khomeini 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, Khomeini was relatively quiet. He was in Najaf, the most important seminary city for Shia Islam located in southern Iraq. And it was in Najf that Khomeini began to write the lectures that became his book, Islamic Government. This was in some ways comparable to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in that it was a documented record of Khomeini's plans for the future. He 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 Khomeini writes in that book about the passage of the Quran that instructs Muslims to form governments that must prepare for war.
- [34:41]
Abbas Milani
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's 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, abandon 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 American Britain. All this has happened because of the incompetence of those who rule over the Muslims.
- [35:58]
Eli Lake
It's worth noticing a few things here. Khomeini is a Shia cleric, 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 Koran. The consensus view of Shia theologians in this period is that the mullahs and ayatollahs should not rule Muslim nations until the 12th hidden imam returns to earth. Khomeini's mention, for example, of the Masjid Al Aqsa is a direct lift from the first Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, who stoked 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, Khomeini is also calling for the restoration of a lost empire. Even though Khomeini would find that the world's anti imperialists lined up behind his revolution in 1979, Khomeini was always an imperialist himself. When Islamic government came out in 1970, the Shah banned its publication in Iran. Now this is understandable. Khomeini was an 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. Imagine if Khomeini's plans for Iran were widely debated and well known. Perhaps many of the liberals and socialists who threw their support behind him for the 1978 and 79 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 Shah to delude themselves into thinking that Khomeini would not seek real political power. And this brings us to the Shah himself. By the end of the 1960s, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi 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 chasm 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 Khomeini 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 Under Secretary of State George Ball had to say in his 1982 memoir about the Shah's ostentatious recharnation of 1967.
- [39:07]
Abbas Milani
What an absurd, pathetic spectacle. The son of a colonel in a Persian Cossack regiment play acting as the Emperor of a country with an average per capita income of 20 $250 per year, proclaiming his achievements in modernizing his nation while accoutred in the raiment and symbols of ancient despotism.
- [39:25]
Eli Lake
A savvier monarch would have kept a lower profile when half his country were still living like peasants. But the Shah was a flaunter.
- [39:37]
Abbas Milani
In celebration of 2,500 years of nationhood, the Persian people led by their Shah, His Imperial Majesty Muhammad Reza Pahlavi Al.
- [39:49]
Eli Lake
Yameir Shah and Shah make homage at.
- [39:53]
Abbas Milani
The tomb of Cyrus the Great, the first Shah of all. Cyrus, king of Kings, champion 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 10 years earlier.
- [40:33]
Eli Lake
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 Welles. 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 Achaemenid 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 1500 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 Masson Jancin and decked out in miles of imported silk and gold. The highlight was a five and a half hour banquet catered by Maximes 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 royal families. The Official toast was 1959 Dom Perignon rose. Here were some of the quail eggs.
- [42:06]
Abbas Milani
Stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, roast lamb with truffles, roast peacock stuffed with foie gras, sorbet of vieux champagne moet 19.
- [42:21]
Eli Lake
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 costs were more likely in the range of 200 to $400 million, still a whopping sum at the time. Barbara Walters asked the Shah about the extravagant cost.
- [42:43]
Abbas Milani
Your majesty, there are some people who.
- [42:45]
Eli Lake
Feel that Iran should not be spending millions of dollars on this celebration while there are still people in need. How do you answer these critics? And why do you think it was important to have this celebration?
- [43:00]
Abbas Milani
First of all, how do they know about what is spent?
- [43:04]
Eli Lake
Really, the only expenses that are made for the festivities are the two official.
- [43:10]
Abbas Milani
Dinners that we are going to give our guests.
- [43:14]
Eli Lake
This is the least that we could.
- [43:16]
Abbas Milani
Do for such a gathering.
- [43:18]
Eli Lake
Well, one can imagine the Ayatollah in 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.
- [43:36]
Abbas Milani
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 shun all participation in it.
- [44:10]
Eli Lake
Historians have debated the spark that lit the fuse of the Islamic revolution in Iran. But at the very least, this extravagant celebration of the Persian empire of antiquity, with its champagne toast and French catering, well, it was at 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.
- [44:53]
Abbas Milani
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.
- [45:07]
Eli Lake
Love which your people give to you. That was President Jimmy Carter making one of the worst timed 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 predecessor's arms sales to Iran a campaign issue. This is Abbas Malani again, who was arrested for his political agitation two weeks before Carter was elected in 1976.
- [45:44]
Abbas Milani
And I was arrested two weeks before the American election that brought Jimmy Carter. Yes, and because Jimmy Carter was a possible winner. Things were beginning to change in prison already when 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, people that could wash our hands.
- [46:20]
Eli Lake
Following Mohammad Reza Shah and quote island of stability. Carter dashed any hopes that the American President would press the Shah to liberalize his governing style. When reform is not an option, more drastic measures usually follow. In this environment, the Shah ordered the country's largest newspaper, Etelot, to run a prominent editorial accusing Ayatollah 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 Qom among the seminary students who worshiped him and often made a pilgrimage to Najf, 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. Khomeini's supporter, 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 8, 1978. This time the demonstrations were all over the country and in particular in the bustling city of Tabriz. 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 Rhode, a former Pentagon Middle east analyst, was a PhD student studying in Mashad, Iran in 1978. And here is his recollection of the scene. With time, there were riots, windows in the university were broken.
- [48:29]
Abbas Milani
No one would talk about what was going on here.
- [48:34]
Eli Lake
But it began to be a bit dangerous. And at one point, the fellow students that I've been asking and who's your family Grand Ayatollah? And they looked at me again with their so good looking faces. They had no idea.
- [48:56]
Abbas Milani
Well, all of a sudden these and.
- [49:00]
Eli Lake
I began to list the names and.
- [49:02]
Abbas Milani
It'S important of six Grand Ayatollahs that I knew, I knew and I mentioned Khomeini, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been thrown out of Iran by the Shah about 15 years before and was living in Iraq. I didn't know much about him, but.
- [49:18]
Eli Lake
I mentioned his name and all the.
- [49:20]
Abbas Milani
Names that I mentioned. People just smiled as if I'm talking from I'm another planet. Then, as things the situation began to.
- [49:30]
Eli Lake
Deteriorate, my fellow students went out into the streets and were yelling, death to the Shah.
- [49:40]
Abbas Milani
Long live Khomeini.
- [49:43]
Eli Lake
As the demonstrations in 1978 became more ferocious and violent, Khomeini used his network to distribute those cassettes of his sermons, putting the blame on the Shah even when his own side may have been instigators. The clearest example is from the summer of 1978. On August 19, a group of arsonists locked the doors of Cinemarex in Abadan and proceeded to light the theater on fire. 400 people perished in the blaze. It was a disaster. The fire department was slow to arrive at the scene seen, and when they did, the hydrants 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 Khomeini and his movement. But the Ayatollah used a catastrophe to his advantage. He would release a tape of another sermon addressed to the people of Abadan.
- [50:46]
Abbas Milani
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.
- [51:08]
Eli Lake
This worked. Iranians directed their rage not at the mullahs, but at the Shah. But more importantly, they did so at the urging of Khomeini. Now, it's important to say at this point that when the Iranian revolution begins, the exiled Khomeini 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 Mohammad Mosaddegh's National Front, the Kremlin aligned to DAB Party, and followers of a sociologist named Ali Shariarty who fused Shia Islam with socialism. Over time, however, most but not all of the leaders of these factions enter into an alliance with Khomeini. In some cases, this is a cynical calculation. Tehran had never in its history been ruled as a theocracy. Khomeini was an effective organizer and speaker, but he couldn't actually form a government for many reasons. In other cases, they really believed Khomeini and his advisors when they promised that Islamism would only guide the democratic process and not consume and replace it. Again, this is Abbas Alani.
- [52:27]
Abbas Milani
So the official National Front, led by Sanjabi and Furuhar, did make peace with Khomeini. The Iranian left, almost en masse, made peace with Khomeini. Some of the Iranian feminists made peace with Khomeini. But there were also Iranian women writers, for example, who stayed very clear and said this. What is coming is 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 Khomeini 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 Khomeini is so reactionary, he can't possibly rule Iran, so we'll use him as a banner, overthrow the Shah and then take over.
- [53:32]
Eli Lake
So at this point, the Shah realizes he has to do something about Khomeini, who has emerged as the voice and leader of this new revolution. He decides in October to ask Saddam Hussein, the tyrant of Iraq, to exile Khomeini. And Saddam complies. This leads Khomeini to a suburb of Paris, Neu fleur le Chateau. 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 and Naja 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 Khomeini, 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, Khomeini 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. Khomeini'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, Khomeini 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 Khomeini after he returns to Iran at the beginning of the hostage crisis in the fall of 1979.
- [56:07]
Abbas Milani
And if the Imam says he will not free the hostages, then what? What can be the answer? But I'm not sure if I can.
- [56:19]
Eli Lake
Get the answer because this was not in the question.
- [56:21]
Abbas Milani
Please ask him. I'm sure it's a very simple, straightforward question.
- [56:38]
Eli Lake
He's not even going to listen to it because it's not in here. All right, 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 whole. And it wasn't just the reporters. Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United nations, told reporters shortly after Khomeini'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 Khomeini 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 Khomeini was a reactionary and a terrorist.
- [57:30]
Abbas Milani
To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is 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 as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices.
- [57:51]
Eli Lake
Seems certainly and happily false.
- [57:54]
Abbas Milani
What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisors is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.
- [58:01]
Eli Lake
The title of that op ed is appropriately quote, trusting Khomeini Part of the problem is that almost none of the analysts at the State Department or the C 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 majlis that was defenestrated under the Shah, and build a liberal republic. Well, it was steamrolled, as we now know, in part because Ayatollah Khomeini 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 Khomeini's revolution would not lead to democracy. This is Ruel Marc 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, you know, the Ayatollah was not an enigma 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 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 Precht 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. 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 in an earlier episode of Breaking History on Edward said's Orientalism. In 1978, Foucault was at the peak of his influence. He was the postmodernist who is 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 Potemkin 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 Jailah Square and the Shah's military. At least 88 people were killed. Many observers might have noticed the panic and 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 Ayatollah sermons on homosexuality, one wonders. But the other fascinating aspect of Foucault's sojourn in Iran is that he is not necessarily fooled by Khomeini's embrace of political Islam. He understands what he wants to do and applauds. For Foucault, political Islam is bubbling with spiritual energy. One thing must be clear.
- [62:30]
Abbas Milani
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.
- [62:42]
Eli Lake
To point to two orders of things.
- [62:45]
Abbas Milani
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. A notion 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 distrust of legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a fate in the creativity of Islam.
- [63:25]
Eli Lake
Savor the following. 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. Well, 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 Abbas Malani.
- [64:05]
Abbas Milani
Why would you trust Foucault? What does Foucault know about Iran? Why should be enamored of these intellectuals? 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 deforming rhetoric.
- [64:33]
Eli Lake
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.
- [65:09]
Abbas Milani
The army at the moment is an army of occupation.
- [65:14]
Eli Lake
It is an army that enjoys no support among the population.
- [65:18]
Abbas Milani
There are widespread resources, reports of passive.
- [65:22]
Eli Lake
Defiance, even mutiny, officers being shot by soldiers, so on and so forth.
- [65:30]
Abbas Milani
It is, as you know, very difficult.
- [65:32]
Eli Lake
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.
- [65:42]
Abbas Milani
Say 2 million people walk around.
- [65:47]
Eli Lake
Into.
- [65:47]
Abbas Milani
Iran and give the regime a vote of no confidence.
- [65:52]
Eli Lake
You cannot keep the army away from this current, from this wave. It was all too late. On January 16, 1979, the Shah departed with his family and servants from Tehran's Mehrabad airport, carried with him a small vial of Iranian soil. Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the.
- [66:13]
Abbas Milani
News broke the Shah had gone. It was like Liberation Day, martial law.
- [66:19]
Eli Lake
Soldiers trapped in traffic were showered with scores of flowers and kisses. The same soldiers who were accused of murders, massacres and atrocities and 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 Khomeini returned from his exile. Stone faced and triumphant. He was mobbed at the airport by jubilant crowds. This was truly a revolution. The caretaker government under Shapur Bakhtiar, a former member of Mosaddegh's Nationalist Front, was completely ineffective. Bureaucrats refused to open government agencies for his minister Khomeini appointed his own Privy Council, who had the real power. The first targets were the feminists, Iranian women who wanted the same rights as men.
- [67:14]
Abbas Milani
Khomeini came back to Iran on February.
- [67:19]
Eli Lake
1St of February 1979. This is Matthias Kunkel, a political scientist who has written extensively on the Islamic revolution in Iran. Only some days later, on February 27, he revealed the law that had allowed.
- [67:39]
Abbas Milani
Women to seek a divorce. So let me give you this example.
- [67:44]
Eli Lake
With women rights at that time, on March 3, women were prohibited from serving as Yazhis.
- [67:55]
Abbas Milani
On March 4, Khomeini declared that only.
- [67:59]
Eli Lake
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 the Olympic team. Subsequently, the female age of marriage was.
- [68:17]
Abbas Milani
Again lowered to 9, and the value of a woman's testimony to a court.
- [68:25]
Eli Lake
Made half that of a man. So this was very clear what is.
- [68:32]
Abbas Milani
Going on in Tehran at that time. And there was a last big demonstration.
- [68:38]
Eli Lake
On March 6 of the women against this development, but in vain. Many in the left, in the Western Left.
- [68:50]
Abbas Milani
Still supported Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution.
- [68:55]
Eli Lake
None of this should be surprising to anyone who had followed Khomeini'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 commingling 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 Khomeini's emissaries promised the military and SAVAK leaders 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 Sadiq. In short trials with no juries, 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 Pokravan, the former SAVAK director who helped persuade the Shah to spare Khomeini's life when he was arrested in 1963 and had those lunches with him throughout that summer. When Pakravan 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, Pokrovan was murdered with a shot to his neck. His trial lasted 15 minutes. By the fall of 1979, it was clear to most Iranians and Americans at least, that Khomeini was a monster. This is when the hostage crisis began. It is after Khalili's tribunals had sentenced scores of former regime officials to death. Khomeini's nasty side is best illustrated in an interview with the legendary Italian journalist Oriana Falach. In Qom, Iran, September 1979. Balachi, slender and intense, sits across from the architect of Iran's revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, 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 taken from the transcript.
- [71:28]
Abbas Milani
Oriana Falachi, the Italian journalist who is noted for her provocative interviews with world leaders, journeyed to Iran in hopes of meeting with the leader of the Islamic revolution, the Ayatollah ruhollah Khomeini.
- [71:39]
Eli Lake
For 10 days she waited in the.
- [71:41]
Abbas Milani
Holy city of Qom for her interview with the 79 year old Ayatollah who is the de facto ruler of Iran. On September 12, she was led into the Fazia religious school where Khomeini holds his audiences. She was accompanied by two Iranians, Niho had helped set up the interview and who served as translators. Ms. Falachi, barefoot, enveloped in a chador, the head to toe veil of the Muslim woman, was seated on a carpet. When the Ayatollah entered, the taped interview began. Forgive me if I insist, Imam Khomeini. I meant that today in Iran you.
- [72:16]
Eli Lake
You raise fear.
- [72:17]
Abbas Milani
And many people call you a dictator. The new dictator, the new boss, the new master. How do you comment on that?
- [72:30]
Eli Lake
Does it sadden you or don't you care?
- [72:36]
Abbas Milani
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 wickedness is a part of human nature and such wickedness comes from our enemies. Considering the road that we have chosen, a road that is opposed to the superpowers, it is normal that the servants of foreign interests treat me with their poison and hurl all kinds of calumnies 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 Shah say lots of things. Even that Khomeini ordered the breasts 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 breasts of women? No, I did not, Imam.
- [73:46]
Eli Lake
But you frighten people, as I said.
- [73:51]
Abbas Milani
And even this mob which calls your name is frightening. What do you hearing them calling out like this day and night, knowing that.
- [74:06]
Eli Lake
They are there, all of them there.
- [74:09]
Abbas Milani
Sitting for hours, being shoved about, suffering.
- [74:14]
Eli Lake
Just to see you for a moment.
- [74:16]
Abbas Milani
And to sing your praises. I enjoy it. I enjoy hearing and seeing them, because they are the same ones who rose up and threw out the internal and external enemies. Because their applause 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.
- [75:16]
Eli Lake
And of the most dangerous kind.
- [75:18]
Abbas Milani
I mean fascist fanaticism. In fact, there are many who see a fascist threat in Iran today and who even maintain that fascism is already.
- [75:36]
Eli Lake
Being consolidated in Iran goes on in a probing way. At one point, when Khomeini suggested she didn't have to wear the hijab she was wearing if she found it so objectionable, Balachi famously responded, that's very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I'm going.
- [75:59]
Abbas Milani
To take off this stupid medieval rag right now.
- [76:03]
Eli Lake
Balachi was clearly a brave woman, but it is often she really pushes her luck. Khomeini is annoyed in this next section, towards the end of their exchange.
- [76:14]
Abbas Milani
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 Kum, even the television set that you so often use to convey messages to the country, even this air conditioner which permits you to remain cool in this desert.
- [76:46]
Eli Lake
If we are so corrupt and so.
- [76:50]
Abbas Milani
Corrupting, why do you use our heavy tools? Because. 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 customers, 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.
- [77:43]
Eli Lake
The fevered devotion of Ayatollah Khomeini's followers made a lasting impression on Orianna Falachi, 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 Khomeini's intelligence and even.
- [77:58]
Abbas Milani
Described him the most striking elderly man.
- [78:02]
Eli Lake
I had ever met, she also saw him as A danger. Valachi predicted that his influence would extend far beyond Iran, warning that his movement could poise on the world. The Islamic Republic Khomeini created did end up poisoning the world. Iran's new regime created Hezbollah, the Islamo fascist 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 2000. 2000 and tens. It funded and guided the Houthi terrorists who 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, Khomeini's Islamic Republic became the most important patron of Hamas. The authors of October 7 Khomeini 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 bo. Today, Khomeini'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?
- [80:35]
Abbas Milani
I believe that this is a very wrong impression that anybody might have of Iran or the Iranians.
- [80:44]
Eli Lake
I would like to remind you that.
- [80:46]
Abbas Milani
Iran has never invaded another country in.
- [80:50]
Eli Lake
The last 200 years. When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to.
- [80:57]
Abbas Milani
They don't mean death to the people of the United States or even to.
- [81:02]
Eli Lake
The officials of the United States.
- [81:06]
Abbas Milani
They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting killing others.
- [81:18]
Eli Lake
Yes. Why would Americans fear a regime that routinely chants death to America supplied insurgents with the roadside bombs that killed and maimed thousands of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least Khomeini's 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. Khomeini's 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 in? The arms you told the soldiers the.
- [82:37]
Abbas Milani
I donut and when they stayed inside.
- [82:40]
Eli Lake
The barracks, you sent your goons outside the scarab. You stole the revolution now give it back. You promised the constitution then took it back you stole the revolution we all.
- [83:02]
Abbas Milani
Above.
- [83:05]
Eli Lake
How many executions will be enough? We came into the street with the shoe be free but now we have to hide the cinemas above the journalists in prison, the mullers that you are arresting politicians. You promised rule of law, democracy and jobs but you fell off the hall and comfort jihad you said you would.
- [83:42]
Abbas Milani
Respect the rebel coalition they're hanging by their necks or riding in the prison.
- [83:49]
Eli Lake
You stole the revolution, now give it back. You promised constitution once upon that you stole the revolution just like a thug. How many executions will be enough?
- [84:18]
Abbas Milani
You can't and our pets oh heavy.
- [84:21]
Eli Lake
Dancing with due respect you Charlie Manson.
- [84:25]
Abbas Milani
We gave you love you give us.
- [84:28]
Eli Lake
Mothers, we spill our blood and wash you stunning. You send us to our act to fight but here at home we have no right. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with with something, or if it 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 and a nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content at vfpg. Please become a subscriber today and until then, I'll see you next time.
- [86:01]
Abbas Milani
Hallelujah.