Breaking History - The Making of Modern Iran (Part 2) | The Red-Green Alliance

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

In our last episode, we traced the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty and the forces building toward Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. In Part 2, we turn to the man who brought that monarchy to an end: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. From exile in a quiet French chateau, Khomeini launched a revolution that shattered 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. But he didn’t do it alone. Liberals and leftists, both inside Iran and across the West, played a crucial role in legitimizing his cause, a dynamic that feels familiar today. This is the story of the first Red-Green Alliance, a tactical partnership between Islamists and the progressive left, and the cost of that alliance once power changed hands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 examined 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 today.

Like you, we care a lot about craftsmanship at breaking history, how things used to be made, and whether that still matters today. Which raises a fair question, can you still build something well? on purpose in America. Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. There, that's VA-E-R, was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking, and they've actually pulled it off. There is now the largest independent watch assembler in the USA, building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode Island, and Alabama, with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. Now, I have to tell you something. I happen to have a beautiful DS2 meridian black Vair. It's quartz 39 millimeter, and I get compliments on it all the time. I love this watch. And the great thing about it is,

I know that when I have this watch, I did not pay a premium for a brand name that simply just connotes that I have a lot of money or I am in style or something like that. No, people admire my watch because it looks wonderful. looks great and it tells time great. And one of the things I really like about the watch is that it also is quite durable. It's waterproof. It uses some of the top grade luxury materials that you would expect in your Rolexes or your other more expensive brands. And I can tell you that the public agrees they've already gotten 10,000 five star reviews. So if you're tired of disposable products and want something that's rugged, timeless, and thoughtfully made, check them out.

Go to VARW watches. That's V-A-E-R-Waches.com and support American craftsmanship. Cutting off military funding for a government that is starving two 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. So there will just will have to be a shift. And I do think that will mean 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.

Israelis want the hostages returned through a negotiated settlement. And by the way, that's the way in which the vast majority of hostages who were returned were able to be returned. We just heard from the former Obama speechwriters on their popular Pod Save America podcast making the case against the U.S. Israel alliance. No Democrat should take A-PAC money, cut off the U.S. military aid. Israel, you see, is starving two 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, "'Pah damn America.'"

This marks a significant moment for the Democrats. In the days after October 7, 2023, a fringe of left-wing activist, 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 program 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 7. But over time, he too became concerned about the intensity of Israel's war efforts. Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed from 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 7. Hamas is evil, or they started the war. Nonetheless, their arrows today in 2025 are aimed 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 unless there is a ceasefire that ends the war. This is the moment to act. So today, as part of this process towards peace, 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 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? ignition of a Palestinian state before the dismantlement of what is left of Hamas is a victory for the plotters of October 7. Terrorism works, guys. The peace process was dormant on October 6, 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 reestablish 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 terror. 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. Amas maximizes Gaza in 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, women's rights, and democracy, find themselves cooperating in the birth of Islamic fascism for Iran? After the break, we find out. and in 1960s 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 in 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. 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. We are listening to a kind of time capsule, a clip from a U.S. government black and white propaganda film on the civil unrest sparked by mother nature and Shah Mohammed Rezapalovie'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 Muhammad Mosaddegh, back in 1953.

Muhammad Rezapolavi 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 U.S. officials to fire Mosadd 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 Majlaz 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, Mosadat. 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 Takay, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Last Shaw. So there's a whole thing happening about essentially transnational.

transforming peasants into successful small farm land-owning families. In some phases unfold better than others, and there certainly was inefficiency and so forth. But it remains, even by the acknowledgement 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. And it had other aspect to it. Shaw created a whole core, the hell. core, the literacy core, and you began to see all these people going to villages.

And when you essentially sent a literacy 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 cleric had constantly, Consequences, and those consequences took the form of a particularly austere and radical Ayatollah. We know him as Ruhala 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 polyle leader was born into obscene privilege and wealth. Khomeini had more in common with the Shah's father, who also endured poverty and hard. 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. You, miserable rich, 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 impure animals? I hope to God that you did not have in mind the olama

and the religious scholars when you said the reactionaries are like an impure animal. Because if you did, it will be different 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. 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 cleracy 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 but 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 Moa, Jamal al-Din Isfahani, railing against excessive price controls on sugar. Prime Minister Mosadeh 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 Kome 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 5th, the Shah sent his Savak to the Fazayyad Seminary again in Kome. Their mission? Arrest Ayatollah.

It seemed like his followers were waiting for it because when word spread of the arrest, tens of thousands 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 fans, 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 dissidents 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 seized at the popularity of Western movies and public dancing. Add to this, Khomeini is also a proponent of terrorism. Khomeini was a radical Islamist long before he became the Khomey that you know today. This is Abbas Melani, historian and the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. In 1945, for example, a Islamist terrorist by the name of Navváhavis Safavid emerges on the scene, kills one of Iran's most prominent secular intellectuals called Katshavi. And the grand Ayatollah of the time, the most influential Ayatollah, probably in 20th century Shiism, I tell her, Burjjerdi, bans Safavi from all seminaries.

He says this guy is a troublemaker. Yeah. One of the only clergy who defies Burjerdi secretly, but tempers and protects Nabobu Safavi, the terrorist, is Khomeini. 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 Franz 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 3rd, 1963 sermon that got him arrested. 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 Faiza 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 us blocking its path. This was not merely a lie. The Savak raided the Faisa Mosque, not Israel, but conspiratorial Western anti-Semitism grafted onto radical Islam, 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 may be a prelude to a wave of terror, an 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

Pachrovan. 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, Savac agents routinely employed torture against high-value prisoners, including the use of electric shocks to the body's most sensitive parts. But when Pakravon was named director in 1963, he implemented real reforms. Again, this is Abbas Malani. Hassan Paul Kravon was director. It was the deputy director first and then the director.

He was a very erudite man. He had extensive connections with the Iranian intelligentsia. His mother is clearly one of the most erudite Iranian woman of 20th century. She was a writer. She was an essayist. She was an educator. And he came and essentially tried to create the Sabak that was initially intended to be a combination of a tank tank, a police force, a security force, a counterintelligence force, and an intelligence force. And one of the first things he did, it banned all torture and tried to reconcile.

the Muhammad Rizashas regime with the opposition. So Pachravon 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.

Pocryan 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 Kome. Now Khomeini, of course, disagrees, but it's important to note that this is a strategy of Pachravon 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, Pachravon never published his views on these lunches, but at Harvard University's

oral history of the Shah's Iran, features his wife Fatima, Pachravon's recollections. Here is what she says about what Pachravon 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, Thimzar, I count the days until we reached 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 Ayatollah? 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. Pachravon 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. Gomeni 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 packs that iron out the details of U.S. basing rights on foreign countries.

For Khomeini, though, this was a betrayal of Iran's national honor. Here is what he said. 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. Well, that was enough. This time the Shah would have to take a more drastic measure. That speech earned Khomeini his own. 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 Pachravon from the Savag. After the break, Khomeini develops his political philosophy, and the Shah throws the greatest party of the 20th century. Exiling Khomeini was the kind of thing earlier Shas 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 Ayatola. 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 a 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 feature his recordings. I remember clearly in 1962, going with my mother to the bazaar, and he, a 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, 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. And here is Mosen Sazgara explaining how this strategy was employed in the 1978 revolution and a WNYC radio documentary. 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 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. And while these speeches were less diplomatic, less polished, than the messages Mosin had 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 Islamic Muslim. state because they thought, okay, it would bring them out onto the street, and it's never going to happen anyway. So let him say whatever he want, 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 Najaf that Khomeini began to write the lectures that became his book, Islamic government. This was in some ways comparable to Adolf Hitler's mind comp, 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. 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 Massjid al-Axa 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 pity differences, abandon their subversive and divisive activities, and joined together like the fingers of one hand, than 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.

It's worth noticing a few things here. Homanie 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 Quran. 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. Pomanes mentioned, for example,

of the Majid al-Axa is a direct lift from the first grandman. Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajamina al-Husani, who stoked violent riots against Jews in Hebron in 1929, based on the lie that Jews sought to destroy the Al-Axa 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 also 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, Mohamed Rezapalovie 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 U.S. 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 Undersecretary of State George Ball had to say in his 1982 memoir about the Shah's ostentatious recorination of 19. What an absurd, pathetic spectacle. The son of a colonel in a Persian Cossack regiment play acting as the emperor of country with an average per capita income of $250 per year, proclaiming his achievements in modernizing his nation, while accoutred in the raiment and symbols of ancient despotism. A savagier monarch would have kept a lower profile when half his country were still living like peasants. But the Shah was a flaunter. In celebration of 2,500 years of nationhood, the Persian people, led by their Shah, his imperial majesty, Muhammad Reza Palave, Ayamir, Shah and Shah.

Make homage at 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 ten years earlier. We are now listening to a propaganda film commissioned by

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 Wells. The film Flame of Persia commemorates the 2500th anniversary of the coronation of Cyrus the Great, the first Shah in Iranian history,

the founder of the Akimid Persian Empire. For this party, the Shah transformed the ancient 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 1,500 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-Generes. and decked out in miles of imported silk and gold.

The highlight was a five-and-a-half-hour banquet petered by Maxine's 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 Domperignon Rose. Here were some of the courses. quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish moose, roast lamb with truffles, roast pick-up stuffed with foie grasped, stuffed with foie gras, sorbet of Vieux Champagne, Mouette, 1911.

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. dollars, still a whopping sum. At the time, Barbara Walters asked the Shah about the extravagant cost. Your Majesty, there are some people who 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? First of all, how do they know about what is spent?

Really, the only expenses that are made for the festivities are the two official dinners that we are going to give our guests. This is the least that we could do for such a gathering. 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. blaming a familiar enemy for this desecration. I proclaimed 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 chanol participation in it. Historians have debated the spark that let 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 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 love which your people give to you. That was President Jimmy Carter, making one of the worst-time 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 predecessors' 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. And I was arrested two weeks before the American elections. Ah. 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, that we could watch our hat. Following Muhammad 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 Khome among the seminary students who worshipped him and often made a pilgrimage to Najaf 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 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-year-old. day period of morning, 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 Savac, seeking to quell the violence, wound up killing at least 100. Harold Road, 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. No one would talk about what was going on here. But it began to be a bit dangerous. And at one point, the fellow students that I've been asking, who's your family, Grand Ayatollah, and they looked at me again with their so good-looking faces in this, like, they had no idea.

Well, all of a sudden, these, and I began to list the names, and 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 I mentioned his name. And all the names that I mentioned, people just smiled as if I'm talking from, I'm another planet. Then, as things, the situation began to deteriorate, my fellow students went out into the streets, and were yelling, death to the Shah, long live Khomeini.

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 19th, a group of arsonists locked the doors of Cinema wrecks in Abadon, 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, 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 Romani and his movement,

but the Ayatollah used the catastrophe to his advantage. He released a tape of another sermon addressed to the people of Abadah. 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. 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 Muhammad Mossadez National Front. The Kremlin aligned Tudap Party and followers of a sociologist named Ali Shariati 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. Iran had never in its history been ruled as a theocracy. Homanie was an effective organizer and speaker, but he couldn't actually form a government for many reasons. In other cases, they really believed Homania and his advisors when they promised that Islamism would only guide the democratic process

and not consume and replace it. Again, this is Abbas Kalani. So the official National Front, led by San Jabi, Frouhar did make peace with Khome. 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, what is coming is bad news.

But unfortunately, the damage was done, not by the ones who said, 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 over the time. over through the Shah and then take over. 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, tyrant of Iraq, to exile Khomeini, and Saddam complies. This leads Khomeini to a suburb of Paris, Nufle de Chateau. He takes up residence in a modest home where he has 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 Najah 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 Homanie, 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 interest was 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 bureaucracy, 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 great.

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. And if the imam says he will not free the hostages, then what can be the answer? Well, I'm not sure if I can get the answer because this was not in the question. Please ask him. I'm sure. It's a very simple, straightforward question. Well, he's not even you can't have been to, in honestesh. He will not do... He's not even going to listen to it

because it's not in the year. 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 report reporters. Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters shortly after Romani'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 Romani 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 Homanie was a reactionary and a terrorist. 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 seems certainly and happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close

advisors is uniformly composed of moderate progressive individuals. The title of that op-ed is appropriately, quote, trusting Romania. Part of the problem is that almost none of the analysts at the State Department or the CIA 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 modulus 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 Mark the wreck, a former CIA targeting officer on Iran, and a student of Lewison'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. The Iran desk at that time was quite an important office. That desk officer named Henry Prett 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 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 Saeed's Orientalism. In 1978, Foucault was at the peak of his influence. He was the postmodernist who was 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 Potemian 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 Jala 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's 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, quote, spiritual energy. One thing must be clear. 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 to point to two orders of things. 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 the fate in the creativity of Islam. Savor the following irony. 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. while 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 Ibas Malani. 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 the hominy rhetoric. 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 14th, 1978. The army at the moment is an army of occupancy. It is an army that enjoys no support among the population. There are widespread reports of passive defiance, even mutiny, officers being shot by soldiers, so on and so forth. It is, as you know, very difficult 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 say two million people, walk around into Iran and give the regime a vote of no confidence.

You cannot keep the army away from this current, from this wave. It was all too late. On January 16, 1979, Shah departed with his family and servants from Tehran's Maribod airport, carried with him a small while of Iranian soil. chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the news broke, the Shah had gone. It was like Liberation Day. Martial law soldiers trapped in traffic were showered with scores of flowers and kisses. The same soldiers who were accused of murders, massacres, and atrocities in 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 1st, 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 Shepur Bakhtiar, a former member of Mosadez Nationalist Front, was completely ineffective. bureaucrats refused to open government agencies for his ministers.

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. Khomeini came back to Iran on February 1st of February, 979. This is Matthias Kunkal, political scientist who has written extensively on the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Only some days later, on February 27, he repealed the law that had allowed women to seek a divorce. So let me give you this example with women rights at that time. On March 3rd, women were

prohibited from serving as judges. On March 4, Romania declared that only 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 again lowered to nine. And the value of a woman's testimony to a court made half that of a man. So this was very clear what is going on in Tehran at that time. And there was a last big demonstration on March the 6th of the women against these development. But in vain, many in the left, in the Western left, still supported Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution. 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 a

forms 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 al-Hali.

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 Pachravon, 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 Pachravon asked the judge to explain the charges against him, spreading corruption on earth, the judge responded, it is what you are guilty. And with that, Pachravon was murdered with a shot to his neck.

This trial lasted 15 minutes. By the fall of 1979, it was clear to me. most Iranians, and Americans at least, that Khomeini was a monster. This is when the hostage crisis began. This 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 a legendary Italian journalist Oriana Fulachi. In Khome, 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 were about to hear is a reenactment of that interview taken from the transcript. 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 Uhala Khome. For 10 days, she waited in the Holy City of Kome for her interview with the 79-year-old Ayatollah, who is the de facto ruler of Iran. On September 12th, she was led into the Fizia Religious School, where Khomeini holds his audiences. She was accompanied by two Iranians, Nairho had helped set up the interview and who served as translators. Miss Falachi, barefoot enveloped in a Chador, the head-to-to-veiled, the Muslim woman,

was seated on a carpet. When the Ayatollah entered, the taped interview, you began. Forgive me if I insist, Imam Khomeini. I meant that today, in Iran, you raise fear and many people call you

a dictator. The new dictator, the new boss, the new master. How do you comment on that? Does it sadden you or don't you care? 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 weakness is a part of human nature. And such weakness comes from our enemies, considering the road that we have chosen, a road that is opposed to the superpower. It is normal that the servants of foreign interests treat me with their poison and hurt 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. But you frighten people, as I said. And even this mob which calls your name is frightening. What do you feel? hearing them calling out like this day and night knowing that they are there all of them there sitting for hours being shoved about suffering

just to see you for a moment and to sing your praises I enjoy it I enjoy hearing and seeing them because they are the same ones who rose open throughout 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. or fanaticism it seems to me that this is fanaticism and of the most dangerous kind 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 being consolidated in Iran.

It 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, I mean. And since you said so, I'm going to take off this stupid medieval rag right now.

Belachi was clearly a brave woman, but it is obvious she really pushes her luck. Romania is annoyed in this next section towards the end of their exchange. But the airplane that brought you back to your country is a product of the West. Even the telephone that you used to communicate with from Qum. even the television set that you so often used to convey messages to the country, even this air conditioner which permits you to remain cool in this desert. If we are so corrupt and so corrupting, why do you use our avid tubes?

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 customs, 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 no one, 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. The fevered devotion of Ayatollah Khomeini's followers made a lasting impression on Oriana 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 described him, The most striking elderly man I had ever met. She also saw him as a danger. Falachi predicted that his influence would extend far beyond Iran,

warning that his movement could poison 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 stooped the civil war in Iraq in the 2000s and 2010s. 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 7th. 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 bomb. 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? I believe that this is a very wrong impression that anybody

might have of Iran or the Iranians. I would like to remind you that Iran has never invaded another country in the last 200 years. When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to

they don't mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States. They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting, killing others. Yes, why would Americans fear a regime that routinely chanced 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 Marx 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 dissidents will have to be tortured in the Islamic Republic's dungeons? For this message to finally sink it. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you like this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family,

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 thefp.com. Please become a subscriber today. And until then, I'll see you next time.