GRANDSON OF AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI DENOUNCES ISLAMIC REVOLUTION, CALLS FOR DEMOCRACY IN IRAN

* “Mother of Revolution” dead at 93
* Unemployment surging in Israel
By Joel C. Rosenberg

(Washington, D.C., March 23, 2009)

Thirty years after the Revolution began — and twenty years after the death of her husband — the wife of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has died at the age of 93, reports the Associated Press. Khadijeh Saqafi was known as the “mother of the Islamic revolution.” She died Saturday in Tehran. “Thousands of people, including Iran’s president and supreme leader, attended her funeral at Tehran University on Sunday,” according to news reports.

The death of Khomeini’s widow will now open the door to renewed and more pointed analysis of the impact of the Islamic Revolution inside Iran. President Obama released a video on Friday reaching out to the leaders of Iran and holding out an olive branch I am convinced won’t be accepted and which reflects the administration’s disturbing lack of understanding of the eschatology — End Times theology — of the current Ayatollah and the President of Iran. Yet, in an extraordinary development, as I report in my new book, one of the Khomeini heirs is denouncing his grandfather’s and grandmother’s legacy and is calling for the creation of a pro-American democracy in Iran. What’s more, this grandson is siding with pro-democracy forces against the re-election of Ahmadinejad in June.

Excerpts from Chapter 16, “The Defector,” in Inside The Revolution:

On September 26, 2003, the grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini — a highly respected Shia cleric in his own right — calmly stood up before an audience in Washington, D.C. He looked out over the crowd, took a deep breath, and then, speaking through an interpreter, denounced the Islamic Revolution, said it was time to usher in a new era of freedom and democracy in his country, and urged the Bush administration to mobilize the American people to overthrow the Iranian regime much as Winston Churchill had mobilized the British to destroy Adolf Hitler.

“As you know, the history of Iran in the nineteenth century was the history of a country under dictatorship,” Hossein Khomeini, then forty-four, told the gathering at the American Enterprise Institute, just blocks from the White House. “But the Revolution and Mr. Khomeini promised to change the Iranian situation and bring democracy to Iran. But, unfortunately, as things turned out, Iran[1] again became . . . [an] even worse dictatorship after the Revolution.”