Just when I think I’ve seen the worse face of Islamic fascism, something like this comes along and leaves my mind reeling.
‘I wed Iranian girls before execution’
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.”
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her “husband.”
“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said.
Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?”
“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.”
These people are monsters. They have forfeited their humanity and taken up the practice of evil, and as such we have no business tolerating their presence on this planet. I cannot conceive of how anyone in the West, regardless of politics, can read something like this and not want to exterminate these savages.
(via The Corner)
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
I see the Pedophile Prophet set the age of consent.
BTW what did the Shah do that was worse than this?
He tried to drag Iran forward into the second millennium.
Well, “worse than this” is a pretty damn high bar. But the Shah did take power in a CIA-organized coup which deposed the democratically elected leader of a secular, fairly liberal and America-friendly government. Part of the reason was British resentment of Mossadegh nationalizing Iran’s oil industry (a bit of history in which Churchill comes across as a real prick); the other part was the fear that Mossadegh’s government would tip to the Commies.
Other commenters may have more expertise or convincing counterarguments, but there is ample reason to believe that putting the Shah in power was a huge mistake, and played the major role in bringing Iran to its present sorry condition.
I don’t believe any accurate reading would leave this in doubt. In that case, putting the shah in power may have been a mistake, but not as large as leaving Mossadegh.
There is a great deal of doubt about who pulled the coup strings, CIA or the Brits (SIS). Undoubtedly, the CIA was involved. However, Iran was dominated by Brit agents, with, as I recall, only three CIA agents on the ground. This came up here at DP a year or two ago. Bill posted a document at the time proportedly disputing the British as the instigators. (It’s not necessarily Bill’s opinion) However, there is ample evidence in the document that the Brits were the instigators including a meeting in Nov/dec 1952 were the idea was brought up by British Intelligence to the CIA. There is also evidence of internal, Iranian instigators seeking help from the CIA.
Iran is in its “present sorry condition” as a direct result of following 3rd century Islamic barbaians.
Excuse me, but the nationalizing of the oil fields is an indicator that he was already communist. He just couldn’t make the change overnight anymore than Chavez can. But make it he would have.
If you remember I, Claudius, this is what was done to the daughter of Sejanus.
I do not think the word “wed” means what he seems to think it means. At least in civilized societies it doesn’t.
Closest civilized society is Israel. Any society that tolerates the existence of such creatures is not civilized.
So the Iranians are going from the 3rd Century to the 1st? They’re actually losing ground, civilization-wise.
In this case, nationalization wasn’t a switch from the private sector to the public. It was more a switch from British to Iranian control of Iran’s oil. Previously, the Brits basically took the oil without paying for it. That oil played a huge role in winning the First World War.
Everything I know about this came from one book, All The Shah’s Men. Now, I’m a pretty big British Empire booster, not so very sympathetic to people who cry “colonialism” and “imperialism”; and the book did cause a slight buzzing of my bullshit detector, mainly because it made some minor claims which it seemed to me should have been footnoted, and weren’t. And who knows, perhaps it understates the Commie influence in Iran during Mossadegh’s tenure. But it was painful to read about the Brits’ attitudes and behavior towards the Iranians. Mossadegh came to power on a one-plank platform, which was “kick them out”.
Who knows what might have happened if the US had engaged Mossadegh instead of deposing him? It wasn’t a possibility, because our allies across the pond were too pissed at losing “their” oil. Anyway, having read the story, I find I can’t work up much nostalgia for the Shah, even if he was our bastard.
BTW, the coup itself is one hell of a story, worth the price of admission right there.
None of this should be taken as a defense of this rape-and-execution business.
MM, I have to admit, I really don’t get your point. Are you saying that the US’s support for the overthrow of Iran’s govt in 1954 somehow explains the practices described in the JPost article?
It’s not quite accurate to say that the US “supported the overthrow” of Iran’s government. The US overthrew Iran’s government directly; US agents in Iran plotted the coup, recruited the players, paid for propaganda and hired mobs of demonstrators to simulate a popular uprising.
Did all this lead to the ‘79 revolution, and by extension to the subject of this post? I don’t claim to know. Mossadegh’s secular government wasn’t liked by the Islamists in his time. Maybe, with US support, Mossadegh’s government and those which followed would have been in a stronger position to resist the Islamists than the Shah was. Certainly Mossadegh was regarded by his countrymen as an Iranian hero, whereas everyone knew the Shah was an American puppet. So it’s conceivable we threw away an opportunity to make Iran a US ally headed by a liberal, secular, democratic government.
It’s also conceivable that we took the best of our very bad options, and should have no regrets. Just about anything would be preferable to letting the USSR get Iran in the Fifties. So I don’t really have much of a point, other than that I have Shah issues.
How many US agents? Where the British involved?
You admit to having read one book* to form your opinion. You might want to do some further study prior to making factual statements.
*Highly flawed in the opinion of many.
I’m going from memory here, flawed in itself. There really is little direct evidence of just what the US involvement was. The CIA agents on the ground (only 3 I believe) are all dead, having discussed this with no one that has ever spoken. The document operation TPAJAX was disclosed by James Risen (NYT) reportedly written by Wilbur in 1954. Wilbur died prior to the release of the report and cannot vouch for it’s authenticity. (this was Bill’s original reference to my response to a long ago post)
As I said earlier, I have little doubt of a major US role. While I believed for many years the brits were the major instigators, it’s quite possible the CIA pulled a double coup, getting rid of a potential communist allied to the Soviet machine and at the same time moving the US into the prominent role in Iran rather than the Brits.
From wiki
BP was and is a PRIVATE company.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
Not exactly installed by the US. Iran was not a democracy or a republic.
Well, yeah. Kinzer is a NYT reporter, so he might well downplay the Soviet threat and make other mistakes. There’s a review on Amazon which reads in part:
So, take your pick. I do think Kinzer did his homework in describing how the coup was actually accomplished, and as I said before, it’s worth reading if only for that. If the CIA today had half the balls of those agents in Tehran, they’d have smuggled all the nukes out of Pakistan by now.
And into Tehran. But only as a “parting gift”.
Yes, but it was also a BRITISH company. The Iranian private sector had no share in Iran’s oil industry, and gave up nothing when the latter was nationalized.
England has a monarch; is it therefore not a democracy? Mossadegh was elected to head a constitutional government (and seized more power unconstitutionally) and he sure as heck ran the country. The Shah was thoroughly afraid of him, and repeatedly refused to have anything to do with a coup attempt. Finally he was persuaded. Then when the effort to remove Mossadegh faltered, the Shah fled the country. So all right, the Shah wasn’t exactly “installed”. But he never would have amounted to anything without US intervention.
My own views in the matter have been evolving today. I now think that the book I read almost certainly overstates Mossadegh’s credentials as a democratic reformer, among other things. But that’s hard to prove. It’s impossible to get a definitive answer to a question like “how popular was Mossadegh really?” or “how important was the Soviet influence in Iranian politics?” So any argument about such factors can only be inconclusive.
Whatever my misgivings about our previous adventures in Iran, I wouldn’t oppose a little forceful intervention right now.
With regards to the whole CIA/Iran issue, I think that describes it well.
I should make it clear, if the CIA orchestrated the overthrow, it’s fine by me. In that timeframe, with the Soviet threat, I have no problems with it. I’m just not sure who did what, and while I may have leaned towards more British influence and orchestration at one time, I do believe there are no definitive answers. Perhaps the CIA has the docs to shed more light on this. Perhaps they will be made public someday.
MM, I never took your comments to mean you supported the current Iranian regime, for any reason. I have always found this particular piece of mideastern history intriguing. I would like to know the answers. I might not like everyone else to know.
MM, I read Kinzer’s book when it first came out, and, like you, I found his work to be reasonably factual. However, I had misgivings based on his career as a NYT reporter, and my own professional knowledge of how to present an entirely factual article that is nevertheless so slanted as to be useless for understanding what actually happened.
It’s all in how you present what you do present, and most important, what you choose not to present.
First, I think there is no doubt that the CIA did play a pivotal role in Mossadegh’s overthrow, and did so at the behest of the British, whose own attempts at a coup had recently failed.
That said, again, the times, the times, the times. The Cold War showed every sign of abruptly turning hot. There was strong reason to believe that Mossadegh, while possibly not a communist himself, might sign on with the commies for his own reasons. This was an extremely familiar ploy of the times - and the CIA spent a lot of time globetrotting and trying to put out these little potentially pro-commie fires.
Eisenhower opened his term in office with the end of Korea, and then, shortly after, the overthrow of Mossadegh. He ended his term with the final planning for the Bay of Pigs, which JFK botched out of a failure of will.
If anybody really wants to understand the tenor of US thinking about the Cold War and how it played out in dozens of places across the planet, rather than study Mossadegh’s downfall, one would do better to study the career of the two most powerful men in the US government during that period - Alan and Foster Dulles, one in charge of the CIA, the other in charge of the State Department. The policy of the two brothers never wavered vis communism: to fight it wherever it attempted to advance its purposes, agendas, and power.
When I was poking around the internet yesterday, I caught a snippet of one review of Kinzer’s book, where the reviewer said Mossadegh’s ouster was due in part to American “communophobia”. As though there was something irrational or pathological about hating Communism. As though “communophobia” would be anything but a dumbshit, illiterate way to say so, even if it was true.
So, Kinzer’s credibility takes a bit of a hit. Anything that makes a Red Retard happy must be taken with salt.