-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.
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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.
A kind of Che Guevara
And that was just the start of the Western delusion that it could keep fanaticism on a leash or utilize “Islamism” against the Soviet and communist threat. Eminent intellectuals had no qualms about heaping praise on a dour theologian who would soon oversee thousands of executions in Iran.
Many in the Left saw Khomeini as a kind of Che Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary and Marxist icon, while the Shah was cast as a figure of corruption like Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. Some claimed the “Islamic Revolution” was a popular awakening against the “corruption” of materialism, and others in the United States compared the Ayatollah to its own Founding Fathers. It was as if intellectual, or moral, dehydration had killed off their brain cells.
Withe the quiet assurance of a fanatic, he proceeded to set the Middle East on fire
Housed by France in the town of Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, Khomeini enjoyed near-constant press attention in the months before his return to Iran. Often sitting on the grass among a medieval-looking retinue, every piece of nonsense, ambivalent declaration or brazen lie he uttered could expect to make the headlines.
Iranians can never forget his stern countenance, and you wonder if his menacing gaze also froze the West. What did he feel, he was asked on the plane flying him back to Tehran from exile, to which he replied, “nothing.. no feeling at all.”
And with the quiet assurance of a fanatic, he proceeded to set the Middle East on fire. To begin with, the new regime’s assault on military cadres emboldened Iraq to attack Iran in 1980.
The Ayatollah’s Western cheerleaders
The list of Khomeini’s Western cheerleaders is long. It included future Nobel laureates like Gabriel García Márquez and Günter Grass, French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, or the journalist Eric Rouleau who described Khomeini in grandiose terms.
Today, seeing images of feminists and representatives of the LGBTQ communities marching for Palestine, I think of the prominent feminists of the 1970s voicing support for Khomeini and the Iranian revolution. The American Kate Millett visited Tehran. France’s best-known feminist and Sartre’s companion, Simone de Beauvoir, sent a 20-member delegation including women and gays — exactly the people Khomeini and his men might have had stoned!
The delegation wanted to talk about women’s rights and members duly met with Iran’s new leaders including Khomeini, the more moderate Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani (soon to die in suspect circumstances) and a liberal prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan (soon to be ousted).
The question of women
We should mention an exception in the Italian novelist Oriana Fallaci, who was derided as an Islamophobe for refusing to join the chorus of praise for the ayatollahs, and for anticipating the regime’s onslaught against women’s rights.
In politics, practically without exception, Western socialists and communists backed the revolution and helped organize demonstrations against the Shah. In the United States, the Democrats would effectively, if surreptitiously, back the revolution. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Andrew J. Young, described Khomeini as a kind of spiritual Democrat, comparing the revolution to the U.S. civil rights movement. The U.S. ambassador in Tehran, William H. Sullivan, compared him to Gandhi. An envoy of President Jimmy Carter in Paris claimed he was leading a peaceful revolution.
Why were there no massive demonstrations in Western cities to support the Iranian protests of 2022?
In the past four decades, what have the Left and the liberals said about the executions, torture and the pummeling of women’s rights, not to mention the regime’s intimidation abroad? Never much more than lifeless, formal or diplomatic condemnations. How could Khomeini and his successors anesthetize the Western intelligentsia’s critical faculties?
Why were there no massive demonstrations in Western cities to support the Iranian protests of 2022, or similar ones in previous years? Where were the demands for democracy in Iran? Why are Western states skirting the issue of the Iranian regime’s role in the October 7 attack by Hamas? Officials just keep saying, there’s no solid evidence, as if afraid of the monster they helped create.
The Western world chose not to see the reality of Khomeini and his movement in 1979, as it does today with Hamas, Hezbollah and their patron, in the very same Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is not unusual for Iranians to react to reports of terrorist events in the West with a mix of indifference and a sense of justification. If Western states will tolerate this hydra, they too are bound to suffer its sting.
