Bad choice

By Kirollos Abadalla —

The West kind of chose Ruhollah Khomeini. It was a bad choice, the kind that Leftist make over and over and over.

Khomeini was exiled to France in 1978, where journalists interviewed him and gave him platform. They liked his mystique — a moral, anti-tyranny figure. His anti-Western sentiment resonated with the Lefties’ Marxist tendencies, which saw capitalism as the root of all evil.

When Khomeini flew back to Iran on Feb. 1, 1979, it was Lefty President Jimmy Carter who warned the Shah of Iran NOT to arrest him. That was a bad choice.

Khomeini was ushered into power by anti-monarchist fervor. His first act of power was to take 52 hostages from the U.S. Embassy and hold them for 444 days. That’s how he thanked Carter for facilitating his rise to power. The hostages were tortured. Carter was helpless.

Ronald Reagan was elected president and threatened to start bombing Iran on Day 1 of his presidency if Khomeini didn’t release the hostages. They flew home exactly as Reagan was being inaugurated.

Khomeini imposed strict Islamic law on his country. No holding hands, much less kissing, in public. Women must cover their hair completely under the hijab — if not, arrest, beating and even death.

He promoted a weird brand of Shi’ite Islam that saw killing all Jews and eliminating Israel as the last requirement for the return of the 12th imam Mahdi before the Day of Judgement. Subsequently, he and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps promoted and paid for terror groups in Lebanon and Syria (Hezbollah), in Yemen (Houthis) and in Gaza (Hamas).

So the true origin of the Oct.7, 2023 invasion of Israel was from Iran.

But while the IRGC funded Hamas to the tune of $1B a year (91% of Hamas’ funding came from Iran), the Islamist regime neglected its own people: today there are blackouts, water shortages and with one dollar you can buy 1.5M rial. Eggs and oil tripled in price in the last two weeks prior to the uprising.

The current uprising — which steamrolled into Day 12 — is not the first. In 2009, the Green Movement was cheated out of the election, and millions poured into the streets, chanting “Where’s my vote?” President Obama (another Lefty) made a bad choice — to NOT criticize Iran, to NOT back the protesters. Some 100 people were killed, and 7,000 were arrested.

If you don’t see the media reporting much about the uprising, it’s because they’re making a choice, a bad choice. They have an anti-Israel bias, and Iran is also anti-Israel, so they feel a kindred spirit and downplay what is going on. They say protesters are demonstrating for economic reasons and leave out calls for regime change. That’s another bad choice.

When President Trump captured Strongman Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, never mind that he tortured and killed his opponents, never mind he’d driven the country in the abscesses of poverty, never mind he propped up Cuba‘s regime, helped China and Russia against the U.S. and sold drugs to help Hezbollah. Never mind all that. The Left made a choice, the bad choice to support Maduro and hate Trump. The narrative on mainstream media was all about Trump’s violation of international law.

You make choices as you move along in life, sometimes you suffer for the bad choices you make.

The Left chose Gaza’s narrative over Israel’s, lockdown over freedom, censorship over freedom of speech.

The same people who told Obama not to criticize the IRGC’s crackdown on the Green Movement have now made another choice, that Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who is organizing from exile the overthrow of the Islamist Regime, is NOT the adequate replacement. It’s a choice.

But the Left doesn’t have a good track record with its choices.

Who are the Iranians in the streets chanting for? Reza Pahlavi.