CBS’s 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl said that during his interview last Tuesday, at the presidential compound in Tehran, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi “was feisty with us, sprinkling his answers with a predictable antipathy toward Israel and Jewish people,” in line with what “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted in English in 2018: “Israel is a malignant, cancerous tumor… that has to be removed and eradicated.”
So, she asked him, “Do you believe the Holocaust happened? That 6 million Jews were slaughtered?”
Raisi came prepared, with a “learned” response: “Look… Historical events should be investigated by researchers and historians. There are some signs that it happened. If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched.”
“So, you’re not sure, I’m getting that you’re not sure,” Stahl pushed. “What about Israel’s right to exist?”
The President of Iran responded: “You see, the people of Palestine are the reality. This is the right of the people of Palestine who were forced to leave their homes and motherland. The Americans are supporting this false regime there to take root and to be established there.”
Raisi became President of Iran on August 3, 2021, and many in the West noted his nickname, the “Butcher of Tehran.” He has been sanctioned by the United States for human rights abuses when he was a judge. He is notorious for his role in Iran’s “death committee” at the end of the 1980s, which sentenced thousands of Iranian opposition members to death. Like many heads of state, most of whom do not murder their own citizens, Raisi will come to New York City this week to speak at the UN general; Assembly.
Here’s a refresher: The United Nations was established on April 25, 1945, when 50 governments met in San Francisco for a conference that drafted the UN Charter, whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations.
So, when Lesley Stahl asked, “You know that Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have all recognized Israel––and have relations with Israel. And it is said that Saudi Arabia is also talking directly with Israel. And I wonder if you want to comment on that.”
He did. He commented that “If a state shakes hands with the Zionist regime, then they are also an accomplice to their crimes. And they are stabbing the very idea of Palestine in the back.”
Here’s the thing: in 2019, Saeid Golkar of Al Jazeera suggested Raisi was “the most likely successor of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei” as Supreme Leader of Iran. And in 2020, Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker described him as “frequently mentioned” as a successor to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now, Khamenei is not long for this world. Last week he canceled all his meetings and public appearances after falling gravely ill and is on bed rest under observation by a team of doctors – except for one occasion when his handlers took him to a conference with hijab-covered students to prove he was still alive.
Today’s Iranian regime relies more than it has done in years on brute force and the suppression of women and national minorities. In 40 years, the regime has become efficient at enforcing its will on the population, and as cruel as they come. Currently, thousands are demonstrating against the regime in protest of the murder of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was picked up by the modesty police because her hijab was not up to regulations. She died in custody. The regime is allowing the demonstrators to rally uninterrupted, even when angry females protesters remove their head coverings. Eventually, as has happened so many times since 1979, the police will come down on them like bats out of hell, they’ll be arrested, tortured, some hanged for treason, and life will go on.
Like the Nazis in Germany, there’s no reason to expect that the evil regime in Tehran would be toppled from within any time soon. It must be destroyed by the civilized nations of the world through the use of massive power. But they won’t, until one day Israel will be moved to confront the heirs of Adolf Hitler and do to them what they wish to do to us.
