Blazingcatfur

The Shi’ite branch of Islam, which has flourished as the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the various ayatollahs for the last half century, believes in the return of the so-called Twelfth Imam, who is descended from Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali ibn Abni Talib. Talib was the fourth caliph assassinated in 661 in a succession war, after which the split between Sunnis and Shi’ites eventually became permanent. According to the traditions of Twelver Shi’ism, the twelfth of these Imams, a boy of five years old, disappeared under mysterious and disputed circumstances in the year 874 – but remained alive. Though communicating with the world through various agents, he entered the state of “occultation” in 941, promising to return when the time would be propitious.

Though the regime’s capabilities to conduct mayhem seem diminished, its efforts persist.

In Tehran back in the spring of 1992, I interviewed Ali Akbar Mohtashami, the hardline cleric who cofounded Hezbollah in Lebanon and helped carry out the devastating suicide car-bomb attacks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983. I recalled his pride in Iran’s attacks and his vow to continue them until Israel was destroyed, its Jews “sent back to the countries they came from,” and Iran had built its own nuclear bombs. As long as Israel existed and there were revolutionaries in Tehran, he told me, there would be “no Americans in Iran and no peace with America.”

Though Mohtashami died of Covid-19 in 2021, I will never forget his determination, and that of other senior Iranians I interviewed on my trips to Iran, to destroy Israel and humiliate America.