Most Belmont Club regulars well remember that the Ayuttolahs, the Majlis, the Guardian Council, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard are the regime that came into being with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and the almost two years’ imprisonment, degradation, and torment of American diplomatic and support personnel.

The enormity of this outrage has faded from the public mind, and with the present intellectual torpor of the educational system, many people simply don’t have a clue about how much of a disruption of international norms this represents. Since the late Renaissance, governments painstakingly have been crafting a tradition and a set of international rules for “permanent diplomatic missions.” The inviolability of embassy diplomatic staff and property have been respected even when countries have been at war, ready to destroy each other. It is a system that works, that has proven its worth to nations in conflict, as a means for transmitting the actual views and intentions of governments that cannot afford to speak plainly to each other in the clear of public discourse.

I’m aware of only a handful of occasions in which an embassy has been violated in modern times:

1) The 1984 murder of Metropolitan Police Service Constable Yvonne Joyce Fletcher, victim of a hail of bullets aimed generally at Libyan nationals behind London police barriers in St. James Square protesting recent Libyan political executions. The machine gun bursts came from inside the Libyan People’s Bureau (i.e., the “Libyan Embassy”) where thugs loyal to Colonel Moamar Gadaffi served in place of any actual trained professional diplomatic staff. The British government was sufficiently outraged by this atrocity that they blockaded the place for eleven days, eventually allowing the criminals to leave under diplomatic immunity.

2) The 1996 siege of several hundred Japanese diplomats, bureaucrats, military officers and guests in Lima, Peru, by 14 terrorists of the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru. Although many of the initially siezed hostages were released early, the terrorists held a number of them for 126 days, until Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori ordered a raid which had been planned and rehearsed for weeks, to overwhelm the terrorists and free the hostages.

3) The invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and the seizure of 52 diplomatic, service, and military staff in 1979, by Iranian “students.” The Ayutollah Ruholla Khomeini had just returned from years of exile in Paris some weeks before and summarily dismissed the interim provisional government. The clerics and radicals who had helped cast out the Shah months earlier were still in the early stages of setting up a replacement government. They did not immediately condemn or support the action – which amounts to a tacit acceptance and approval. The “students” took this as full endorsement, and continued tearing apart the embassy offices, parading blindfolded hostages before the Western news crews each day. Presently, Khomeini and the other clerics observed that the international outcry against them actually served to consolidate support for the infant Islamic Republic, among the faithful. They ignored international outrage, and proceeded with the process of arresting and eliminating dissenters, communists, leftists, union organizers, and infidels of all other faiths, meanwhile cementing Shari’ah in place, arresting, trying, and imposing condign punishment upon adulterous and immodest women, thieves, homosexuals, blasphemers, et cetera.

Of those three incidents, only the Iranian seizure stands as an unresolved act of international outlaw behavior, an outrage not merely against the USA, but a violation and mock of the entire diplomatic system the international community has depended upon for half a thousand years. It’s taken decades for the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Republic to slowly re-open diplomatic and trade relations with a substantial number of other nations. This has been at least partly because many of the Islamic middle eastern countries are ruled by authoritarian secular regimes, and view with deep alarm the prospect of spreading Islamic Theocratic rule that would supplant them as emphatically as it would any government of unbelievers.

In many ways, you can see how a Radical Leftist pointy-headed Law School Academic with celebrity-unrepentant-bomb-making terrorist personal friends – “OUTLAWS” – would tend to admire and want to emulate the Regime of the Mullahs.

You can see it in the oceanic pronouncements, skimpy on details, but toplofty in sweeping emotion and uncritical grandeur.

You can see it in the imperious irritation shown in the dismissal of protest at the torrent of fresh enormities and dismantling of institutions held as irreplaceable by most of the country.

You can see it in the generation of encyclopedic new rules, so akin to the recorded instructions from the Great Ayutollah to his followers on every aspect of human activity, from sexual relations, to eating, bathing, attitudes, and proper bathroom hygiene.

And finally, you can see it in the threats, bullying, and sheer intimidation of those who fail to knuckle under with the desired promptness.

Andrew Young, the civil rights activist who was elected to serve as Mayor of Atlanta, to the U.S. Congress, and who was appointed by James Earl Carter to represent the USA in the United Nations, predicted that the Ayatollah Ruholla Musavi Khomeini would eventually be regarded as a modern-day saint.

It’s true.

I can imagine a certain cosmopolitan chief executive (PBUH) standing in front of the mirror trying on the sacred robes and turban.

“You know the difference between you and me?” he grins boyishly at the shade of Khomeini and shoots his cuffs. “I make these look GOOD!“