[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
Thirty-five years after taking part in the massacres of thousands, Ebrahim Raisi’s chopper went down over a mountain. The former prosecutor had lived long enough to become President Raisi.
Widely seen as a likely successor to the current Supreme Leader of Iran, the crash of the helicopter carrying the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ was celebrated with fireworks in that same city.
Many of those celebrating were the Persian women he had tormented for so long.
President Raisi was said to have harbored a special hatred for women and he has been held responsible for everything from prison rapes to the torture of pregnant women. The cleric and former prosecutor had overseen the brutal suppression of human rights protests against the Islamic regime as part of a record of his crimes against humanity going back to the 1980s.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran had brought many monsters to power. Raisi among them. One of the Islamic student radicals who turned a nation with freedom and civil rights into a ruthless Islamic theocracy, Raisi also represented the last generation of the revolution. Still in his early sixties, it was expected that he would usher in the next era of the Islamic Revolution.
But within weeks of Iran’s arrival at a nuclear threshold, Raisi went down in a Bell helicopter that the United States had exported to Iran back in the era of the Shah. Iran had spent billions on nukes, ballistic missiles and drones but neglected to invest in developing its own civilian aircraft.
While the price of putting guns ahead of butter is usually paid by civilians, it was the ‘Butcher of Iran’ and his entourage, including Iran’s Foreign Minister, who appear to have paid the price.
The Islamic regime’s allies, Iran, Turkey, Russia and even the European Union scrambled to help. But while there may have been mourning in Moscow and on college campuses, there were celebrations by Iranians who remembered all too well the atrocities perpetrated by Raisi.
And for widows still mourning their husbands and children mourning their parents, the bloody tide of Islamic atrocities by the Jihadist regime goes back to when Raisi was a young man and the ‘Will of Allah’ and ropes attached to cranes took their loved ones away from them forever.
In 1988, a humiliated Ayatollah Khomeini having been forced to accept a ceasefire after losing the Iran-Iraq War began a murderous purge of thousands of his political opponents.
The Ayatollah, deathly ill and terrified of a domestic uprising, delegated the killing to the ‘Death Committee” whose members included Ebrahim Raisi. Raisi had been appointed a prosecutor despite having a background in little more than Islamic theology. But under Sharia, Islamic law, that was enough for the twenty-eight year old cleric to become a member of the quarter responsible for the killings of between 3,000 to 8,000 opponents of the Jihadist regime.
The Ayatollah Khomeini had declared that his political opponents were not true Muslims and were waging war on Allah. In response to his command, the ‘Death Committee’ signed off on mass hangings on an industrial scale during which thousands were killed in only a few days.
Brutal interrogations were used to determine who was a true Muslim and who was an apostate. Those deemed Muslims survived while those who were judged to be non-Muslims were killed. Prisoners were asked if they believed in Allah, read the infamous ‘Koran’ and whether they fasted on Ramadan. Those who refused to recite Islamic prayers were beaten and tortured.
In a foreshadowing of Oct 7, part of the Islamic massacres also involved mass rape. A top Islamic cleric later recalled that unmarried girls executed on charges of “waging war against Allah” were first ‘married’ and then raped by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard so that they would not die as virgins and have a change of going to Islamic paradise.
While the EU, Russia and Turkey have rallied to search for Raisi, the bodies of the vast majority of those murdered by the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ in the 1980s were disposed of and hidden. Families have been demanding that they be released so that they can at least be buried.
Instead of releasing their bodies, Raisi and his regime have gone on lying about them.
Many of those families wish that a fraction of the same effort had been invested into finding their loved ones that is being lavished on finding the location of the man who murdered them.
But on a lighter note, the search for Raisi’s chopper has unleashed a whirlwind of celebrations, memes and satirical anecdotes among the Persian people at home and in the diaspora.
The Islamic terror regime strived to project strength and power, but state television footage of regime agents in orange jackets shuffling through maps and getting lost looking for Raisi has instead made the Islamic Revolution appear comical and inept. The men who aspired to rule the region and rain terror on America and Europe stumble blindly through the wind and darkness.
Their real objective isn’t Raisi, dead or alive, but an effort to maintain power over the country.
“Mohammed made the people believe that he would call a mountain to him,” Francis Bacon amusingly described. “The people assembled: Mohammed called the mountain to come to him again and again: and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, ‘If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.’”
The mountain never did go to the Supreme Leader of Iran and so he ended up going to it.