How is it OK to celebrate murder?

The United States and Israel murdered the supreme leader of Islam.[1]

How is that OK? How is it so OK that people can casually mention that they approve of murder in otherwise polite conversation? I guess some people just need killing? What the hell kind of a morality is that?

If you were to accept this, then you’d have to at least have intimate knowledge of the person whom you’ve condemned, no? But people don’t know the first thing about the Ayatollah; they know only that they’ve been ordered to hate him. He is Emmanuel Goldstein (Wikipedia).

I spoke with a co-worker last week, who casually parroted the line parroted by all European official and most members of Congress: “If you ask me, I’m glad he’s dead, at least.”

Can you imagine?

People so easily celebrate the death of a person they’ve never met, about whom they know nothing—or about whom what they think they know they never think to question—and then feel satisfied about their moral superiority. An old man has been killed and they think nothing of how it reflects on them to say that they’re glad he’s dead.

All of the information that they have about the man comes from the people who have been trying to kill him for decades. This doesn’t disturb most people at all. They never think about it. They don’t think about why they hate people they’ve never met, in countries they’ve never been to, who speak languages that they don’t understand, and whose history they know nothing about.

They have no idea what his name is. They have no idea how to spell it or even say it. They don’t even know whether Ayatollah is his name or a title, or whether there has been more than one since the revolution, or even when the revolution was, or what they were revolting against. They have no idea, and they don’t care. They just parrot what the media has trained them to parrot, like good little monkeys.

What did the Ayatollah do in his life? What was his role in Iranian society? In the Muslim faith, in Islam? What did he preach? What did he do in his life? Over which parts of society in Iran was he in control? Did he order the hangings himself? Are there really hangings? Are there really hundreds? Maybe, maybe not.

But you don’t know. Because the people who are telling you that you should be really mad about all of the oppression and all of the hangings are the same people who were telling you about Iran’s “Revolutionary Guard”—does such a construct even exist? Or is just a name out of the children’s comic book that people in the west use to learn about Iran?—tearing out the wombs of women that they’d raped in order to cover up the evidence of the rapes. That was a NY Post headline, almost certainly planted by Israel and/or the CIA.

That’s who you get your news from, people. That’s the “information” on which you base your vaunted opinion that it’s a good thing that an old man was killed. It is for these people that you have thrown your principles and morality out of the window by celebrating the death of a religious figure. It is from them that you will not hear about the girls’ school that was one of the first places that the U.S. and Israel bombed.

This truly is the depths of anti-intellectualism.

But it has always been thus.

Iran is the enemy and always has been, for my entire adult life. They and the Russians have never, ever, ever experienced a reprieve in public opinion. The impression that most western citizens have of these countries and their peoples is uniformly provided by people who hate Iran and Russia. The only way to they could get into the good graces of the west is to allow themselves to be eviscerated and vassalized by Empire.

The depictions of these countries and their people are caricatures. Even more deviously, the depictions are the worst of the west itself, projected onto the countries and peoples that it has selected to be enemies.

Iranian Army

The future will laugh ruefully at the simplistic idiocy, at the base immorality, at the crude manipulation. They will laugh because it worked. They will grudgingly admire how the fools in charge of the west were able to easily predict the minimal amount of effort required to convince people to allow the murder of entire nations full of people. It is a pathetically small amount of effort.

People are eager to hate, as long as they see themselves benefitting from it, or they can be convinced that they are benefitting from it. This, too, is depressingly easy, requiring almost no effort at all, once the ball is rolling. They are eager to hate to assuage the fear instilled in them by the same people that urge them to hate.

I offer the following two videos as an antidote to this indoctrination.

Prof. Mohammad Marandi humanizes the Ayatollah

*SPECIAL* − Prof. Mohammad Marandi : Latest Developments LIVE From Tehran by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

“[…] he was a person who lived a very simple life his children—all of them live a very simple life. Now that he’s passed away, I can say that I knew him. I wasn’t close to him, but I’ve met him on numerous occasions. I met family members of his regularly and none of them even have businesses. Not that he’s against business, but he prevented anyone from his immediate family from getting involved in business just to make sure that the family, the entire family is super clean.

“He was a volunteer in the war before the revolution. He was in jail—he was imprisoned numerous times and tortured. When the war started, he had no military experience, but he left for the warfront and fought. At the end of the war, when he was president, when the United States entered the war on the side of Saddam and they shot down the airliner and they started attacking Iranian naval installations and Iranian naval ships.

“The war fronts were very unstable and he went to the war fronts as the president. I saw him there and it was very dangerous for him because he would be a key target but he went from front to front to strengthen the morale. He was never a person afraid of death and he was always a religious scholar. The Christian martyrs in Iran—and I’ve posted a lot of these—he would on Christmas he would go to the family the houses of Iranian Christian martyrs on Christmas—for the Armenians it’s in January, for other Christians it’s in on the 25th of December, as in the United States.

“So he has visited numerous families of the martyrs. The narrative on Iran in the United States judge is completely fabricated and it has demonized this country for 47 years. And the reason for this, is Iran’s opposition to the Israeli regime and Iran’s insistence on being independent. But, if there was no Israel, I would assure you that Iran and the United States today would have would have embassies and we would have normal trade and business. But it’s the Israeli regime that insists on hatred and animosity.”

“They’re slaughtering people. They’re slaughtering families. They destroy apartment blocks. People are thrown 30 meters away from their homes. Kids, men, women, people on the streets lying, dying, kids under the rubble at the school. When they bombed the school on the first day killing 165 girls, we didn’t see anything in the western media and the Persian language media in the west because they have this huge media apparatus in Persian which is hostile towards Iran. There was no concern. They didn’t care about these kids. It wasn’t just the US government or this racist Zionist regime, but it was the entire media apparatus whether liberal or conservative. No difference. They seem to take pleasure in bombing cities and slaughtering people and they’re completely indifferent.

“[…]

“[Young people in Iran] did not see the crimes that the United States had committed alongside Saddam Hussein against us. And they could not feel, they could not comprehend what sanctions meant and how these sanctions were imposed from abroad to strangle us. But now they see it vividly how the empire so crudely slaughters men, women, and children. And then you watch CNN and and Fox News or you read The Guardian or Breitbart, they’re more or less the same. These students, who are very all of them fluent in English, see them as sinister and so their world views are evolving. What Trump has done the Iranian leadership, Iranian thinkers and intellectuals could never have done in a 100 years to change the opinions of these young people.”

The U.S. knows nothing about Iran

This is an excellent, clear-eyed report by Alastair Crooke, explaining that most of what people think they know about Iran is wrong. And most of what they think has happened in the war is wrong. Iran is taking damage but the U.S. has lost irreplaceable resources.

Can Israel & the U.S. Sustain Iran's Military Power? (w/ Alastair Crooke) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

Top comment:

“The war is going so poorly Trump will have to start releasing Epstein files just to distract from it”

Closing remarks:

“Chris: I just want to close, having worked in Iran for many years, and I believe you did too. The caricature of Iranians including the supreme leader—who was extremely literate: his favorite book, I believe, was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables—is part of the problem, in that they have been turned into cartoon characters. And we’re talking about a rich, deep, Persian culture and tradition. They’re not the people they’re painted as.

“Alastair: I couldn’t agree with you more. […] you put your finger on it. This is a catastrophe of miscognition. They just don’t understand. And what is more, there is absolutely zero empathy. They view and treat the Iranians as Israeli subhumans.”