The forgotten rights of Iran

All of us have a duty to stand with protesters

As the New Year dawned and the downtrodden people of Iran were erupting in raucous exuberance from the streets of Qom and Mashhad and Tehran and Kermanshah like the first flowers of spring, we were all agreed, then. U.S. President Donald Trump agreed with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed with our own Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, who agreed with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who agreed with UN secretary general, António Guterres.

The clear consensus from the utterances of all these statespeople over the past week is that the people of Iran have every right to free speech, and the right to protest peacefully. Everyone agrees that Iranians are perfectly entitled to assemble in manageable gatherings to complain about the unconscionable price of eggs, butter and flour. Everybody says so, so it must be true. And it is, as far as it goes.

In Iran, the right to assemble in groups is subject to police permission, mind you. And free speech is enshrined in the Islamic Republic’s constitution, even, but it is subject to the proviso that one must take care not to damn the regime itself, because Khomeinist orthodoxy exalts its tyranny as “a branch of the absolute governance of the Prophet of God.” What this means is, if you don’t take care to mind your tone, you can be found guilty of “enmity against God” and sentenced to death.

So while everybody is instructing the long-suffering people of Iran in the scope and content of their rights and in the peacefully obedient manner in which they might be permitted to exercise them, it is useful to consider some other ancient and universal rights that the Iranian people are also fully entitled to exercise.

The right to tyrannicide. The right to vigorous, revolutionary violence. The right to sedition and sabotage.

The right to insurrectionist mayhem. The right to wage armed struggle in the cause of overthrowing the filthy, corrupt and wicked Khomeinist regime in its entirety, once and for all.

It is worthwhile to point out these rights because they do not require Trump’s forbearance, or Rouhani’s, or anybody else’s sufferance or imprimatur or say-so. These rights are fundamental and inalienable, and they happen to be more directly pertinent to the agonies of the Iranian people at the moment, owing to their status as the ground-down and desperate subjects of a bloated theocratic despotism who are now at their wits’ end, marching in the streets, risking their lives and liberty, shaking their fists at police and setting things on fire.

Ordinarily unmentionable in the polite language of statecraft, these rights derive directly from moral philosophy and jurisprudence going back more than 2,000 years. Plato understood the necessity of murdering unjust kings; the first tyrannicide known to history was carried out by two of Plato’s students, who executed Clearchus of Heraclea in 353 BC.

The right to kill a tyrant was held as a duty, as well, by the 10th-century Islamic philosopher Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, and by the 13thcentury Dominican philosopher Thomas Aquinas. By what justification? The question was best answered by the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, in 1599: “Because he is a public enemy and oppresses his country with all evils, and because he truly and properly puts on the name and nature of a tyrant, he may be removed by any method and he may put off his power as violently as he took possession of it.”

By any method, then. By any means necessary, as the black liberationist Malcolm X put it in his address to the Organization of AfricanAmerican Unity in 1964: We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

This is not to counsel that Iranian protesters should exercise any of these ancient rights in any way. Iranians have had quite enough of know-it-alls and windbags interfering in their affairs, foremost among these being the bloated ayatollahs who spend their time interfering and instructing them in what they might eat and drink, what they might wear, what they are allowed to think and what they are allowed to say out loud.

It is merely an enumeration of rights that accrue to the Iranian people specifically because they do not have recourse to a lawful and non-violent means to change their government or materially alter the wretched circumstances in which they are expected to subsist, and because they are denied the liberties and freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Pointing this out is necessary because it is apparently possible in the early hours of the year 2018 for an elected Member of Parliament in Canada, Richmond Hill’s regime-friendly Liberal Majid Jowhari, to imagine he can get away with saying this, via Twitter, which is banned, incidentally, in Iran:

“As our government is closely monitoring the ongoing protests in Iran; it is my sincere hope that the brave nation of #Iran have the opportunity to air their legitimate financial, social and political concerns ... with the support of their elected government, in a secure environment and without the fear of persecution.”

With the support of their elected government?

Very briefly, this is how Iran’s “elected government” works. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presides over the country’s “Guardian Council,” and the Guardian Council decides who may be allowed to run for seat in the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, and who may be permitted to run for president. And no matter who gets elected, Ayatollah Khamenei appoints most of the cabinet posts, and appoints the judges, and runs most of the bureaucracy, and controls most of the military apparatus, and runs foreign policy.

All the while, Khamenei presides over his own vast state-protected holding company, the Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate Emam — Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam — that a Reuters investigation estimated to be worth $95 billion in real estate, factories, investment funds and other holdings. Add to that the huge kleptocracy run by Khamenei’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and its vast economic footprint in the oil and gas industry, real estate, mining, banking and telecommunications, and it should not be surprising to hear the words Marg Bar Diktator, Death to the Dictator, rising in a chorus of chants in the streets of Iran’s cities these days.

Among the many excruciating moral and strategic considerations that would have to go into any decision within the realm of the inalienable rights we’ve been looking at here is the brute fact of the regime’s capacity and propensity for violence. There remains the possibility that Iran’s uprising might invite the kind of mass murder and barbarism inflicted on the Syrian people these past six years by the Khomeinist satrap Bashar Assad. There also remains the hope that Iranians might throw off the yoke of the ayatollahs with the same efficiency and mass non-violence as the Tunisians managed when they drove out the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in the first few days of 2011. Tunisia today is a free country.

So one lives in hope. But when we insist, as we should, that it is up to Iranians to decide how they might emancipate themselves from the clutches of tyranny, we must concede, too, that it is up to Iranians to decide what weapons they will require to break their chains. None of us has the right to hector them against tyrannicide, revolutionary violence, or mayhem. All of us have the duty to stand with them, and to offer up whatever aid we can, in whatever form they may choose.

DERIVE FROM MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND JURISPRUDENCE GOING BACK 2,000 YEARS.

AFP / GETTY IMAGES Iranian students protest at the University of Tehran during a demonstration driven by anger over economic problems in the capital on Dec. 30. The students were outnumbered by counter-demonstrators.