I remember when Margaret Thatcher died and many on the Left gloated, were jubilant. They sang “Ding Dong the witch is dead”. I thought it all a bit off, tbf.
I do celebrate the death of Iranian president -- in that helicopter crash -- Ebrahim Raisi.
Does that make me a hypocrite?
First off, I’m just joining in with the many Iranians who are setting of fireworks to celebrate his death. That’s the sane young people, the young Persians, who are not at all in love with a Shia Theocracy.
Then there’s a difference between Maggie and Raisi.
The clue is in their nicknames. Maggie was the “Iron Lady”. Strong in her belief of how Britain had to change to bring it into the 20th Century. She went after the unions, especially the Miners’ Union and broke them. That sure made her unloved amongst many.
Raisi’s nickname? "The Butcher of Tehran”. Why that? Because he was personally responsible for the deaths of 30,000+ young people, people mainly of the Left, who had supported the return of the Ayatollah Khomenei from France to Iran, to establish the Islamic Republic in 1979.
So there’s that. Maggie’s union-busting is not quite the same as wholesale slaughter of idealistic youth, hanged by putting a rope around their necks and raising them slowly on cranes so that they choked to death slowly. The women were first raped -- to be sure they are not virgins, because, you know, Islam is so genteel and kindly that it doesn’t allow the killing of virgins.
Yes, Maggie is different from Raisi. One a principled woman; the other a mass-murderous psychopath today bent on eviscerating all Jews. It’s not hypocritical to be against dopey chants of “ding-dong the witch is dead” and yet to celebrate the death of the Butcher of Tehran.
Raisi has been instrumental in all that Iran has done to make itself the Terror OG of the region, tying together all its surrogates, Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi. With the ultimate aim of turning the region into a Shia Theocracy.
Along the way, he’s butchered many more opponents of the regime. Which caught the eye of the leadership and successive promotions, up to president. He was also Supreme Leader in waiting. The Supreme Leader in Iran -- aka The Ayatollah -- is the one who makes the real decisions. He’s the one who decides when the mass murder of Jews will happen. He’s the one who decides when the Bomb they’re close to finalising, will be dropped on Tel Aviv. And how and when the surviving Jews will be sent to their Final Solution.
How often have people fantasised about killing Adolf Hitler when he was a baby? Or a teenager in Vienna? Or as a young adult in Munich? That’s all fine, apparently. To do the mental experiment and to imagine how many lives could have been saved, by preemptively killing the creator of the Third Reich and the Final Solution.
That’s why I do celebrate the death of Ebrahim Ravi. He already had a bloody history. His future would have been slaughter-on-slaughter. His death stopped that.
Yet we must know that is death will change nothing. There will be another president in waiting. And another Supreme Leader in waiting. Still, it’s one more out of the succession and the further down the list you go, the less capable a mass murderer you are, one must presume.
It’s the same reason I’m perfectly fine with Israel assassinating the five Iranian nuclear scientists. An Occasional Reader asked me: “surely you can’t believe it’s ok for Israel to murder Iranian nuclear scientists? Without trial? In front of family? Surely not?”.
Oh yes, I can, I reply. I think it’s perfectly fine.
Those scientists are NOT developing nuclear weapons for defence. They are developing a nuclear bomb -- which by some accounts they are very close to finalising -- purely to kill Jews in Israel. Their government -- their president Raisa himself! -- have said so repeatedly. Their aim is to bomb, to nuclear bomb, to nuke Israel into oblivion, so that “the rubble is dancing”. Yes, they do hate Jews that much. With a deep, visceral, unfixable (I fear) hatred.
Killing nuclear scientists at the very least delays that. It’s the equivalent of killing the baby Hitler. If you’re on for that thought experiment, you’ve got to be on for killing would-be genocidal holocaust do-over merchants. Enablers of mass murderers, this time with Nuclear ovens.
ADDED: what did western governments do in response to Raisi’s death? They sent -- by X --condolences to Iran and the “families of the president and others killed in the crash”. Sickening.
