When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
blog

Gunmen kill 11 at Mexico drug rehabilitation centre

Gunmen have killed 11 people and wounded at least eight others in an attack on a drug rehabilitation centre in the north of Mexico.

(BBC NEWS) MEXICO - The attack took place late on Sunday in Torreon, an industrial city in the border state of Coahuila.

Police said the assailants escaped in two pick-up trucks.

Mexico has seen an explosion of violence in recent years as gangs fight over trafficking routes, with drug rehabilitation centres often targeted.

READ MORE

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

Sympathizing With Hamas? The Left Already Made That Epic Mistake With Khomeini

Protests in big cities in the U.S. and Europe against Israel may remind some Iranians of the Western Left's deluded, and arrogant, support in 1979 for a revolution that turned Iran and the Middle East into a cesspool of terrorism.

Photo of a protestor holding up a sign during a rally demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war

Protesters in Los Angeles California participate in a rally to demand an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war

Bahram Farrokhi

-Analysis-

LONDON — Western capitals are witnessing large demonstrations to support the Palestinians people and denounce Israeli actions in Gaza, typically with prominent left-wing politicians leading marches and the liberal media inciting opinion against the Jewish state. For those old enough to remember events in Iran in 1978 and 1979, when protests helped topple a Westernizing monarchy to replace it with a revolutionary regime, there is a sense of deja vu.

For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.

Throughout 1978, Western capitals were also the setting of mass gatherings against Shah Mohammadreza Pahlavi, Iran's last monarch, whom the Left especially denounced as a tyrant. The protests expressed broad sympathy with his nemesis the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

By early 1979, Khomeini had seized power, and was showing Iranians what a real dictatorship meant.

Looking back, we know the Islamic Revolution might not have succeeded — though it's difficult to say for sure — without the intellectual collusion of Western writers, public figures and politicians.

It was a different time in terms of mass media, in their scope and impact, and there was certainly no Internet. Many inside Iran would catch the news, if not rumors, listening to the BBC World Service. Yet even the limited media like radio, television and newspapers duly allowed the friends of the revolution, including its Western friends, to inject their ideas into Iranian society.

Iran's know-it-all generation of 1978 lapped it all up, swallowing the propaganda whole. It was a epic mistake that engulfed the nation and ruined the lives of its children and grandchildren, with the punishment for such hubris cascading down to the generations that would follow.

And yes, the idiocy wasn't confined to Iran. It had infected cultural and political circles in the West that would turn their backs on the 18th century Enlightenment and all the advances it had made in history, politics and religion.

Keep reading...Show less

The latest