What ayatollahs are doing, is a crime. Why they are doing it, is idiocy

by Lev Tsitrin

The title of the news report, “Iran Executes Man Over Nationwide Protests” sent shivers down my spine at ayatollahs’ criminal cruelty, but as I read on, ayatollahs’ rationale (“He was accused of “moharebeh,” or waging war against God, a charge that carries an automatic death sentence”) literally made me laugh.

Was it not idiotic (not to mention, idolatrously presumptuous) for the ayatollahs to equate their regime with God? Yet this is what they plainly did. In “blocking a street in Tehran and attacking a member of the Basij militia with a machete” Mr. Mohsen Shekari was waging war against the regime — an action which the ayatollahs equated to a “war against God.” Apparently, to ayatollahs their regime is same as God.

This, of course, is laughable — for so many reasons. Just to scratch the surface, can there be want in a country governed by God? It is impossible: whatever is wanted — resources like food, water, or protection from the enemies — would be instantly provided (like in the biblical story of Exodus, in which God shielded Jews from the pharaoh’s army as a pillar of fire, allayed their thirst with water produced out of a rock, and fed them with manna falling from heaven). Compare this to ayatollahs who can’t provide water — much of the countryside being parched, the water redirected to the cities — fueling despair and discontent. And far from having supernatural protection, Iran’s rulers rely on brutes (who for some reason call themselves “revolutionary guards,” though they serve the establishment, not the revolution). Ayatollahs’ regime is God’s regime? Come on, don’t make me laugh.

Not only are ayatollahs’ claims to God-sanctioned rule absurd and idolatrous on the practical, empirical level; they are equally absurd and equally idolatrous on the purely intellectual level, too. Ayatollahs rely on an axiomatic to them fact that God talked to Mohammed and, therefore, Koran is God’s word, so in following the Koran (in their, Shia reading of it) they follow God’s will — by instituting His rule in Iran as a prelude for His future, world-wide triumph. This logic is full of obvious factual and logical holes, however. Any two-step communication involving three parties is by its very nature unreliable. Whenever the first party relays information to the second, and the second party passes it to the third, the final recipient — the third party — can never know whether what the second party is telling it is true or not.

And yet, this is precisely the pattern of the putative Koranic “revelation” in which God talked to Mohammed, who in turn relayed the message — via the Koran — to the rest of humanity. Needless to say, not a single one of the billions of people thus “enlightened,” ayatollahs including, can possibly know whether Koran is indeed the word of God, or not. It simply does not follow that God talked to Mohammed from Mohammed’s assertion that God talked to him. May be yes, may be no. Possibility and certainty are two very different things, and equating them — as ayatollahs do — is an error which, in religious terms, leads to idolatry. (For the exact same reason, it is impossible to even establish Koran’s intended meaning, which lead to bloody sectarian splits within Islam itself immediately following Mohammed’s death. Our post 9/11 self-hypnotizing assurances that “Islam is the religion of peace” are equally fatuous: for some Moslems it is, for others’ it isn’t — and it is impossible to know whose is the “genuine,” and whose is the ‘perverted” Islam.)

And than, there is yet another, and equally bizarre aspect of the accusation of “waging war against God”: such accusation implies that it is possible to wage war against God. Huh? Clearly, a war of a human against a god is futile: the potencies of the parties are far too mismatched; a zero cannot fight an infinity. It takes another god to fight a god (and Greco-Roman mythology provides many instances of such conflicts) — but this is polytheism, pure and simple. In accusing the late Mr. Mohsen Shekari of “waging war against God” the ayatollahs reveal the polytheistic underpinnings of their innermost mindset. (In “The Pitfall of Truth” I argue that Islam is, quintessentially, a polytheistic religion, despite Koran’s many and loud declarations to the contrary).

I will leave to the others to argue the political wisdom or the lack thereof of the acts of brutal intimidation like the hanging of Mr. Mohsen Shekari (what Fouché said of another political execution, “it was worse than a crime; it was a mistake” may well be applicable to ayatollahs’ brutality, too); but what certainly comes across as apropos is another quotation, that from the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in which he thusly summarized the rule of demagogic, authoritarian Perón: “Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy.”

How true! There is plenty of oppression, plenty of servility, and plenty of cruelty in ayatollahs’ Iran — all rooted in ayatollahs’ idolatrous, polytheistic idiocy that is the most salient feature of their regime.

Lev Tsitrin is the author of “The Pitfall of Truth: Holy War, its Rationale and Folly.“