Fitzgerald: What Iran owes the "Palestinians"

The current training of "Palestinian" terrorists in the Islamic Republic of Iran is only quid for a previous quo. For back in the late 1970s, it was the "Palestinians" who extended such critical aid, in men and training, to those who would overthrow the Shah and replace him with the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iranian leftists of the Feda’iyin-e Khalq were trained by George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And the Muhajedin-e Khalq was organized and trained by Fatah, the same Fatah that warlord and Arafat henchman Mahmoud Abbas now relies on as the armed wing -- let's call it the west wing -- of the "moderate" facade he presents to eager Western donors, with their Will To Believe (Anything). Fatah also trained future members of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

When Khomeini came to power, his first foreign visitor, welcomed royally, was Yassir Arafat, and with him came a large number of PLO officials. No doubt Mahmoud Abbas was among them. And there, the Israeli Embassy, which had been seized by Khomeini's men, was formally turned over to the PLO, the "Palestinian" flag raised over it, and a "Palestinian" ambassador solemnly named to Iran.

Perhaps you are an intelligent, thoughtful Iranian in exile. As you walk the streets of London or Los Angeles, you sometimes imagine yourself as a Russian in exile in the 1920s, trying to explain to the locals what the Russian Revolution wrought, and realizing how impossible it is to convey that reality to someone who did not live through it. You have tried, not always with success, with your own children, or other young relatives who never knew what Iran, with all of the admitted faults of its ancien regime, was like before Khomeini. For you know, and feel keenly, what a horror Khomeini, and his hanging judge Khalkhali, and those mullahs, and that Ahmadinajad, and all the rest of them, have been for Iran. You know, though perhaps you don't like to dwell on it -- it may be too painful -- that Iran's cultural significance or civilizational greatness existed before Islam. And even after Arabs brought "the gift of Islam," that greatness was embodied in Persian poets (Firdowsi, Sa'adi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam) who were great despite Islam, and often in opposition to the cultural and linguistic imperialism of the Arabs that accompanied Islam. Despite a Blue Mosque or two or ten, what would Iran have been like, you wonder, had the Arabs never brought that Islam.

And you might ask yourself, as well, what would Iran be like today, had not the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, the "Palestinians," been so favored by the world, and had they not, therefore, been in a position to help bring to power someone with the worldview of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and continuing in a direct line to such epigones as the Ayatollah Khamenei, and Mr. Ahmadinejad, and all their works, and days.

One wonders how many intelligent people in Iran, or among the Iranians intelligently in exile, wish that Islam had never arrived, that "gift" from far more primitive people, the gift that for the Iranians keeps on giving -- trouble, pain, anguish, mental desarroi. How many, secretly, would wish they could tow their own country out to sea somewhere, away from the Arabs and the other Muslims, adopt Zoroastrianism or Christianity or nothing at all but the cult of poesy (Sa'adi, Hafiz, Firdowsi, Omar Khayyam) and let Persians, as they see it, be Persians?

Just look at the magnificent polities in the Middle East today. Who doesn't envy them? Who doesn't wish to live in a land such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan -- the four countries where the Shari'a is most strictly observed? What American, Canadian, Englishman, Frenchman, Italian, would not give his eyeteeth to live in a place as virtuous and upright as those run by Ahmadinejad, or the benevolent and generous Al-Saud?

And so the Iranians are now repaying a debt by training "Palestinian" terrorists in the Islamic Republic of Iran, devoutly hoping that as the Shah was overthrown and replaced with the Ayatollah Khomeini, so Infidel governments everywhere will one day come to the same end.

Posted by Hugh at March 15, 2008 9:34 AM
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