The end is near for the mullahs of Iran, which is bad news for the Islamic Republic of Iran, but good news for the Persian people, who have a chance to free themselves of the baleful effects of the Arab conquest and — finally — join the community of Western nations by casting off its imposed Islamic theocracy and, it is to be hoped, Islam itself. The late Shah of Iran attempted, in part, to de-Islamicize historic Persia of its foreign influences via the restoration of the Peacock Throne, but his revolution was overturned, in part via the Soviet-inspired meddling of the Iranian Tudeh Party, which left the gates open for the ayatollah Khomeini.
Both the Russians and the Americans lost when Khomeini came to power, and Iran shortly thereafter seized the hostages at the U.S. Embassy, precipitating (among other events, including the disastrous American economy) the fall of the Carter administration and the election of Ronald Reagan. Ever since, Islamic Iran has been unremittingly hostile to the United States, as well as to its schismatic co-religionists elsewhere in the Muslim-conquest world, especially Sunni Iraq and, of course, Saudi Arabia.
That’s been a triumph for Shi’ite Islam, but a disaster for the Iranian people, whose numbers include not only ethnic Persians but Jews, Assyrians, Kurds, and many others. The brief flowering of art, science, literature and poetry during the so-called “Golden Age” of Islamic Persia was soon enough snuffed out. As I write in my forthcoming book, The Fiery Angel:
It is fashionable today to cite the Islamic “golden age” – a direct result of its contact with Christian Europe, we should keep in mind – as a model, not just for what Islam could one day again become (unlikely, since militant Islam explicitly wishes to return to its seventh-century purity), but also as an apologia for Islam’s many and violent sins against the international order. But until Islam casts off Saudi-fueled Wahhabism and Iranian Shi’a millenarianism, gives up its supremacist designs, and becomes willing to accommodate peaceful co-existence contact with West – beyond its oil-driven importation of Mercedes-Benz and Maserati automobiles and Western firearms – this is unlikely.
As the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus — quoted by former Pope Benedict XVI in his controversial 2006 Regensburg lecture (controversial only to apologists for Islam, that is) — observed in 1391:
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
Little more than half a century later, in 1453, Constantinpole fell to the Muslim Turks, marking the final end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the long night of darkness that has enveloped the Middle East pretty much ever since. Christendom lost control of the lands of its origin, including the reconquered Crusader states of the Levant (one of which still survives, barely, as Lebanon), and the battle line between Europe and Islam was drawn from Gibraltar to the Balkans — the beginning of a long, uneasy truce that lasted until Sept. 11, 2001. As I wrote on Twitter (@dkahanerules) last week:
If Christendom reasserted control over its historic birthplaces, the world would be a better, happier, more peaceful place. The Levant, Anatolia, Constantinople, Roman Africa. Imagine. https://t.co/FEo0Jrx2Gn
— Michael Walsh (@dkahanerules) December 25, 2017
The events unfolding in Iran right now are therefore a long time coming, and ought to be welcomed not only by those fearful of the “Islamic bomb” that Iran is hell-bent on possessing and which the Obama administration’s disgraceful, faciliatory “deal” made all but inevitable, but by all adherents of the Western notion of freedom. During the last serious protests in Iran, the “green revolution” of 2009, Obama reacted supinely, standing idly by as the youthful demonstrators were shot in the streets of Tehran and the “clerics” restored iron-fist rule.
A lot has changed since then. For one thing, the Shi’ite-partial Obama is gone, having been replaced by his polar opposite in Donald Trump:
Big protests in Iran. The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2017
For another, the Iranian exiles who fled their country in the late Seventies and early Eighties (taking a great deal of wealth with them) for the U.S. and elsewhere have given birth to a new generation of secularized Iranians, who are in no mood to trade in the liberties of the West for the repressively “theology” of militant Shi’ite Islam. Having seen what happened to their parents and grandparents, they are unlikely to feel a sudden surge of Islamic patriotism; in fact, it has been the prospect of losing these people for the ummah that lies behind so much of the Islamic propaganda that has been allowed to flourish, shamefully, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West since 9/11.
So let’s all root for the Iranians who are, once again, trying to overthrow their reactionary Islamic regime. A victory against the mullahs in Iran would have beneficial results for everybody except devout Shi’ite Muslims and their allies of convenience on the American, largely atheist and most certainly anti-Christian, Left. By removing the source of Hezbollah’s support, pressure would be relieved on Israel and on American forces still in the dar-al-Harb theaters of war. By demolishing rule-by-mullah, Iran would pose much less of a nuclear threat to civilized nations. And by freeing the Iranian people to choose a new government, the Western democracies could find a valuable new ally in a strategically important part of the world.
For millennia, the people of Iran have been unable to decide where to cast their lot. In its attempts to move westward, the Zoroastrian Persian Empire was defeated repeatedly by the Greeks, by Alexander the Great, and by the Byzantines; later, Persia was conquered by the Muslim Arabs, by the Mongols (who really put paid to the “Golden Age”) and by Tamerlane, among others. If Iran can successfully overthrow the Islamic Republic, de-institutionalize Islam, rediscover its own genuine nationalism, and elect a real republic in its place, this historically pluralistic nation will likely find a warm welcome.
Islam has brought nothing but misery to Iran. Perhaps it’s time for Iran to try something different.
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