What splendid hypocrisy to call him “the butcher”. What splendid hypocrisy to think about what Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president who died on Sunday afternoon after a helicopter crash on the border with Azerbaijan, represented during his lifetime. What splendid hypocrisy to focus on the number of Iranians killed by Raisi himself, on the number of women tortured by Raisi’s will, on the number of homosexuals killed by Raisi’s will, on the number of times the former president gave the order to shoot, to charge, to execute, to kill someone for simply trying to make the word freedom count in Iran. It would be simple and comforting to say that the bad guy was him, the butcher, but whoever has unloaded on the figure of Raisi, in these hours, the weight of the horror sown in recent years by Iran did so with the explicit desire to observe the finger , and not the moon, and therefore to bypass the real issue which should also be close to the heart of those who consider it the West’s duty to defend human rights.
What splendid hypocrisy to call him “the butcher”. What splendid hypocrisy to think about what Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president who died on Sunday afternoon after a helicopter crash on the border with Azerbaijan, represented during his lifetime. What splendid hypocrisy to focus on the number of Iranians killed by Raisi himself, on the number of women tortured by Raisi’s will, on the number of homosexuals killed by Raisi’s will, on the number of times the former president gave the order to shoot, to charge, to execute, to kill someone for simply trying to make the word freedom count in Iran. It would be simple and comforting to say that the bad guy was him, the butcher, but whoever has unloaded on the figure of Raisi, in these hours, the weight of the horror sown in recent years by Iran did so with the explicit desire to observe the finger , and not the moon, and therefore to bypass the real issue which should also be close to the heart of those who consider it the West’s duty to defend human rights.
Raisi was not the abstract expression of a dictator willing to sacrifice the freedom of his people to assert his personality. Raisi was the genuine expression of a precise algorithm of terror in the face of which many continue to whistle, pretending that the problem is the finger and not the moon. Raisi, for those who have not yet understood, was the faithful spokesperson of a ferocious, dark, retrograde and fearful Islamist ideology that has held Iran hostage since 1979.
An ideology that since 1979 has transformed Iran into what it will be as long as the West continues to cause confusion in the Middle East between who the victims are and who the aggressors are. All the men, women, homosexuals, activists, Jews, Christians, Westerners killed by the regime led by Raisi in recent years, and killed by Raisi himself in the 1980s when he was responsible for the executions of political prisoners, they were killed not due to a delirium of omnipotence on the part of the president, but because Raisi did nothing but respect to the letter the verses of the Koran most loved by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And the same goes for the foreign policy supported by Iran: the support for Hezbollah, for Hamas, for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, for the Houthis, for the Iraqi popular mobilization units, for the Assad regime, the fatwas approved against writers who dare to criticize the regime, the women killed because they dare to rebel against the veil, the all-out fight against the Americans in the Middle East, against Israel, it is all functional to a bigger plan at the center of which there is not a cold theme of geopolitics, of domination of the territory , but there is an explicit desire to export, protect and promote the Islamic revolution, as enshrined in the Iranian Constitution which, identifying extremist Islam as the solution to every problem, inevitably sees imperialism and the West as the roots of all the problems of the Muslim world. The opposition to secularism and liberalism arises from the belief that coexistence between dar al Islam (land of Muslims) and dar al Harb (land of unbelievers) is impossible. In Islamic terms, this belief sees dar al Islam in a state of permanent war (jihad) and peace between Muslims and non-Muslims as unattainable. “No Muslim should think that peace is ever possible between Islam and unbelievers or between Muslims and unbelievers,” Ayatollah Khomeini said in 1981.
This is why nothing will change in Iran after the butcher’s death. Because changes in Iran do not depend on the change of leaders but depend on the strength with which the countries that want to free the Iranian people from their Islamist oppressors will put the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism on trial (curious that the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for the leaders of democratic countries, such as Israel, and not for the leaders of countries that export terrorism, such as Iran) and they will understand that fighting, limiting, sanctioning, reducing the Iranian Islamism is the only way to have greater freedom in Iran, greater peace in the Middle East and greater security in the world. The finger is Raisi, the moon is Islamism: who wants to see it?
