From an Islamic Republic towards an Islamic Government

Etemad-e-Melli newspaper on its March 5, 2009 issue had an interesting report on the Religious Democracy Conference held by the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute of Qom. The report correctly calls it "a conference by the critics of democracy," for almost everyone in the conference opposes democracy. The views of the holders and participants of the conference, among which are Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi and some of his students, are most illuminating especially because the coup d'etat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known to be a faithful follower of Mesbah Yazdi.

The first presenters while believing that literal obedience from the principals of democracy is against the teachings of Islam, continue to say that its possible to domesticate democracy into the Islamic state. Then comes Mesbah Yazdi himself. He says those who talk about domesticating democracy are talking from "an ugly extremistly submissive" point of view. He believes the complete accepting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is against Islamic judicial instructions such as execution and amputation (of hands), and hence not acceptable. He continues that Ayatollah Khomeini did not believe that the the government needs popular support to be legitimate. He says that while Khomeini has argued that the pre-1979 Imperial regime of Iran was unpopular and hence illegitimate, he used the popularity argument only for the sake of the argument and did not believe that Islamic government should have popular support. Those who come after Mesbah Yazdi are (if possible) even more extremist. Hojjat-al-Islam Haji Heydar argues that popularity is not even acceptable for the purposes of an argument. Asserting that Velayat-e Faqih is not the democratic pillar of our government, he says undemocratic institutions should outrank democratic ones. There should be a high council of 45 faqihs that outranks the popularly elected "lower" parliament.

This is only a sample of the beliefs of those who are gaining more and more power in Iran. Mesbah Yazdi is believed to have issued a Fatwa permitting election fraud. And this is only one of the horrible things attributed to him. But all of the dreadful rumors aside, the mere opinions of his presented here is enough to know what kind of person we're dealing with. And these are not the kind of people that stop at the borders of Iran. Their goal is global domination as is the goal of Islam. If they are not stopped right now, there might come a time soon that is too late.

There's one last thing that I owe to the Ayatollah to mention here. As much as I despise this man, he is at least frank about his beliefs on democracy. There are many others in the ranks of the Islamic Republic that more or less believe in the same things but try to hide their beliefs under the masquerade of their sham elections.