President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran is dead. Dead, too, is Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. Both had held their positions for about three years.
During their tenure, Iran armed and supported Hamas provocations against Israel from Gaza and Hezbollah attacks against Israel from Lebanon. Iran was behind the various militias within Iraq attacking United States facilities and personnel. Iran has more than 50 military bases in Syria and supports both Hezbollah’s activities there as well as Shia militias in their gruesome attacks on civilians. Iran arms and directs the Houthi attacks not just on regional adversaries but the entire world via disrupting international shipping in the region. Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian largely managed the ramping up of all of this over the past three years.
Iran has entered into the Russia-Ukraine war as a major arms supplier to the Russians. Iran has lied its way through every nuclear nonproliferation negotiation it has had with the West. It continues to obscure the extent to which it has achieved progress on weapons-grade nuclear material. It has declared repeatedly that it wants to disrupt global economic, commercial, and energy relationships and works toward that end. Iran continually threatens the West with nuclear destruction. These men were behind all of these recent activities.
Image by Andrea Widburg
Domestically, under their leadership, attacks on civilians wanting to join the world of free expression, including brutal beatings and tortures of adolescent girls for hair and hair covering violations, increased exponentially. Gays were thrown off tall buildings. Political opponents were rounded up. Raisi wasn’t called the Butcher of Tehran for nothing, and he carried his youthful excesses right into his presidency.
Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian supported and emboldened Hamas and are both complicit in and responsible for, along with many others, the tragedy of October 7.
Yesterday, they chose to fly in a 40-year-old helicopter, in poor weather, during the dimming hours, into cloud-obscured mountains, and have now gone onto their forever home.
Exodus 15 tells us how Moses and the Israelites sang in reaction to the deaths of the Egyptian army that was after them. In verse 12, they sing, “You stretch out your right hand, and the earth swallows your enemies.”
In verses 20-21, we read, “Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them:
Sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
Both horse and driver
he has hurled into the sea.
The loss of life in the helicopter crash was not a tragedy that the world should mourn. It was an obliteration of evil over which we should rejoice. We should join in the Songs of Moses and Miriam. In whatever way their deaths came about, two wicked, wicked men will no longer trouble the beloved people of this world.
Anony Mee is the nom de blog of a retired public servant who tweets at X.