In the most anticipated speech of his storied career, Rafsanjani has finally weighed in on the side of the opposition in Iran’s post-election crisis. While Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his despotic cohorts have praised the election as “blessed” and divine, the “freest in the world,” and the “death-knell of liberal democracy in the world,” Rafsanjani declared it incurably flawed, and the source of a “crisis of confidence” in the nation. It is, he said, un-Islamic to “ignore people’s votes,” bluntly accusing the regime of stealing the election. He demanded the release of all political prisoners, saying they must be allowed to offer their services to the nation. And he began his sermon by conjuring the name of Ayatollah Taleghani–easily the most democratic cleric of the early days of the revolution, and the man, not incidentally who edited the new version of Ayatollah Nai’ni’s famous twentieth-century treatise on the necessity of democracy for Shi’ite countries. In nearly every one of these defiant declarations, he was taking aim at Khamenei, once again reaffirming that the days of Khamenei as the infallible spiritual leader have mercifully ended.
