Lost in the election-year drudgery that is America’s current foreign policy discussion is a fact most won’t dispute: The Ali Khameini regime in Iran has been brutal at home and abroad, restricting human rights within its borders and supporting murders and assassinations around the world. While the right-wing saber-rattling has been nothing short of irresponsible and misguided, a naturally broad rebuttal against their IRAN IS ALL-POWERFUL AND BAD FOLKS argument leads to a denial of the total shittiness of Khameini and his clerical thugs, granting the terrible leaders of post-Shah Iran the clemency they don’t deserve. (And while we’re on the subject of who deserves what: the Iranian people don’t deserve Khameini, et al.)
In this context, Roya Hakakian’s Assassins of the Turquoise Palace is a great read, an example of the pathetically infantile pettiness carried by the Khomeini-Khameini regimes. Hakakian’s subject is an assassination in September 1992, the gunning down of four Iranian-Kurdish leaders at a Greek restaurant (Mykonos) in Berlin. At a meeting of opposition members, two “hulking, bearded figures” executed the killings with a chilling lack of precision, firing a silenced machine gun with little regard for who was and wasn’t hit. Continue reading
