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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, December 12, 1979
Page 11
because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability...
This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to the respect and the
admiration and the love which your people give you."
The Shah previously had trouble with arch-foe Ayatollah Khomaini as early
as 1963. The main grudge the various Ayatollahs and mullahs had against
the Shah was a simple, politically-motivated one: The Shah, in his
ambitious land reform program wanted to reduce the size of the vast
holdings of religious-held land. (He had already divested himself of his
own crown-held lands, in order to set an example. That, plus his desire
to emancipate Iranian women, earned the Shah the eternal wrath of Iran's
Islamic leadership. It's been a simple, cut-and-dried power struggle all
along.
Many, including Senator Ted Kennedy, have decried the Shah's reign as
being exceptionally violent and repressive. The facts, however, don't
bear out either the cries of the U.S. liberal-left establishment or the
outrageous allegations of Khomaini's pseudo-government.
(The new Foreign
Minister Gotbzadeh is fond of calling the Shah the "most evil man on face
of earth.") According to a British expert on Iran, normally in an average
year, 100 persons were imprisoned or killed for their political beliefs,
these being avowed enemies of the Shah's government. Says this expert from
the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: "The notion
that the Shah was uniquely vicious doesn't bear up. There is hardly any
Third World government that cannot be accused of similar crimes."
Charges that the Shah bilked his country of billions of dollars are
similarly overstated: Reports Newsweek, in the December 10, 1979 edition:
"The Shah's critics usually fail to mention that the great bulk of the
Pahlavi wealth was in Iran and reverted to the Iranian government when
the Shah fled. 'If anything, the Shah may have increased rather than
plundered the wealth of Iran,' says University of California political
scientist George Lenczowski. 'Iran was left with a fantastic amount of
money.'"
The facts are, the Shah was a friend of the U.S. and the West for 37
years. But he was no lacky either, as his critics also charge. He led
the push for a steep rise in OPEC oil prices. There was a reason behind
this as well. Britain had abandoned its "seagate" holdings in Aden and
the Persian Gulf, leaving a dangerous vacuum. The Shah needed money to
finance a rapid increase in Iran's armed forces in order to become the
"policeman of the Gulf." In this he had Washington's full support.
The undermining of the Shah graphically reveals the bankruptcy of
America's recent leftist human-rights policy. David Horowitz, a selfÂ
professed Marxist romantic in his early years, writes in the December 8
edition of The Nation about the "blind spot" of the left: "Above all,
the left seems trapped in its romantic vision... The left's indignation
seems exclusively reserved for outrages that confirm the Marxist diagnosis
of the sickness of capitalist society. Thus, there is protest against
murder and repression in Nicaragua, but not Cambodia, Chile but not Tibet,
South Africa but not Uganda, Israel but not Libya or Iraq. Political
support is mustered for oppressed minorities in Western countries but not
in Russia..., while a Third World country that declares itself "Marxist"
puts itself--by that very act--beyond reproach. In the same vein, almost
any 'liberation movement' is embraced as just that, though it may be as
unmistakably atavistic and clerically fascist on first sight as the
Ayatollah Khomaini's in Iran."
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau