Nick Kristof continues reporting from Iran:
“Either officials change their methods and give freedom to the people, and stop interfering in elections, or the people will rise up with another revolution,” Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri told me.
“There is no freedom,” added Ayatollah Montazeri, who is among the senior figures in the Shiite world but is excluded from power in Iran because of his reformist ideas. “Repression is carried out in the name of Islam, and that turns people off. . . . All these court summonses, newspaper closings and prosecutions of dissidents are wrong. These are the same things that were done under the shah and are now being repeated. And now they are done in the name of Islam and therefore alienate people.”
Whoa! Ayatollah Montazeri was a leader of the Islamic Revolution, and was initially designated by his close friend Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to be his successor as supreme leader of Iran.
Read the whole thing.
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