Showing posts with label overthrow of the Shah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label overthrow of the Shah. Show all posts
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Sunday, June 14, 2009
YNET NEWS: Young Iranians may topple Ayatollah regime in wake of elections fiasco
Upon the publication of the official results of the Iranian presidential elections in 2009, which showed incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the clear winner, regime rivals including the government of Israel can be satisfied.
Ahmadinejad’s victory, which most people believe was apparently achieved via a well-oiled machine of fraud, threats, the deployment of armed forces, closure of rival headquarters, and disconnected cellular phones, may mark the beginning of the end of the Ayatollah regime. This regime was established by the Ayatollah Khomeini 30 years ago, in 1979, after he led a revolution that toppled the Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty.
During the past 30 years, Islamic regime leaders made sure not to repeat the grave mistakes made by the previous regime. As they took advantage of the Shah’s mistakes in order to topple him, Islamic leaders knew precisely which errors to avoid. However, in the latest presidential elections they revived the well-known dictum that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.
On several occasions during his rule, the Shah was accused of forging election results; large strata of society believed these charges and this laid the groundwork for the popular revolution against him in 1978-79.
Yet on Friday it was the Islamic regime which so blatantly forged the results of the Iranian presidential elections. >>> Soli Shahvar | Sunday, June 14, 2009
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
THE TELEGRAPH: Simon Scott Plummer examines Khomeini’s mesmeric hold over Iran and the Islamic world
The Islamic Revolution in Iran was the most significant event of the last half of the 20th century. Some would even rank its importance in modern history as second only to the fall of the Bastille. Along with the American and Soviet withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan in 1975 and 1989, it marked the emergence of Islam as a global political force after centuries of impotence, and a corresponding decline in superpower hegemony. To read Con Coughlin’s book is largely to understand how a septuagenarian cleric who had spent 15 years in exile was able to overthrow an authoritarian monarch with a terrifying security apparatus and armed forces bristling with Western weapons.
By the second half of the Seventies the Pahlavi shah, Reza Mohammed, had alienated most of Iranian society, from the clergy to the merchants. But popular discontent went back much further than his reign. The granting by the previous Qajar dynasty of concessions to British American Tobacco in 1891; the Russian invasion of 1907; Britain’s majority stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; the British and Soviet occupation from 1941 onwards; the CIA-backed overthrow of the prime minister Mossadeq in 1953; the last shah’s dependence on Washington: all these were waymarks on a road of national humiliation.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini offered a radical alternative to the puffed-up Pahlavis. His title denoted a considerable Islamic scholar. His lifestyle was simple and his opposition to the shah coherent and courageous. Yet these qualities do not fully explain the mesmeric hold he had over Iran and the wider Islamic world.
There must have been something in his appearance and way of speaking to generate the wave of joy when he returned home in 1979, and of grief when he died 10 years later. In dealing with notorious figures, it is easy to underplay their personal charisma. >>> Simon Scott Plummer | Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback & Hardback) – Free delivery >>>
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