(Although this item is new and fresh today, I mistakenly posted it under yesterday’s news post which has disappeared. I hope it is OK to post it here as new post)
The Supreme Dictator is patently incapable of acquiring instantaneously what he never possessed: Morality and a conscience. Are the people supposed to be grateful for this “magnanimous” and belated move from the Man Who Endorsed Every Crime Over Three Years?
The people have concluded–accurately–that Khamenei never gave a damn about them. In that respect, he is exactly like Syria’s Bashir Assad. Why does this amnesty come so late and only when Khamenei faces his greatest domestic crisis ever? Every crime committed since 2009 has irreversiblytainted the IRI and its leader. There is so much to hate about this regime and and not a single thing to love. The Syrians have shown Iranians what is possible in such an environment.
Can Khamenei bring those he murdered back to life? Can he give back the years of suffering? Can he untorture and unrape those he ordered tortured and raped? Can the Defender of Death Squads undo the attacks on relatives, the plainclothes muggings, the forced confessions, the humiliations and state trials he approved? It is no more possible than Assad can undo the destruction, the massacres, the shabiha rampages.
Evidence of Khamenei’s incorrigibility is everywhere. Even as he issues his amnesty, the Holy One luxuriates in what is indefensible: continued censorship of media and the internet, job purges for any public employee who boycotts fake elections,gender segregation and uniforms in universities, new arrests on the same high-handed charges (“crimes against God,” “propaganda against the state”), further corruption and economic incompetence, the IRCG’s economic monopolies, its brutality and its threats, the arrests of defense attorneys, journalists, artists and human rights spokesmen, the coddling of a private militia created to stomp all critics, the crimes against minorities and women (most recently banned from archeology), and the continued existence of a Guardian Council whose sole purpose is to render Election Days meaningless and real change impossible.
AN INESCAPABLE CONCLUSION
The concept of absolute monarchy, secular or otherwise, is no longer accepted in the Middle East today. No government in which the people have a token say can survive. Therefore the Islamic Republic must fall and not just because of years of non-stop and unforgiveable crimes. Its central doctrine could hardly be less compatiible with an unstoppable modern tide.
Khamenei and the hard liners around him will never grasp what they are up against. This belated amnesty will no more calm Iranians than Assad’s trivial reforms calmed Syrians in March of 2011.
