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ELAINE SCIOLINO wrote in NYT:
"Ayatollah Khamenei has struggled to appear above the fray, but without
success. He failed to persuade the Guardian Council to reinstate more than
a tiny percentage of the candidates they had banned, then insisted the
election be held anyway."
There is a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between Khamenei
and his appointed people in appointed bodies of government in some of the
materials written about Iran in the Western media. Khamenei is their boss
and they do what they are asked to do. All these appointed people
totally represent Khamenei's concerns and ideas. During Khomeini you could
find some of these appointed people with somehow different lifestyles and
ideas from the leader. Khamenei cannot tolerate anyone who does not agree
with him - at least verbally- even in his non-critical decisions and
statements. In Khamenei's point of view, people are divided to two groups:
friend and foe. He has repeated this idea more then one hundred times.
In this election, the policy of mass disqualifications was clearly
Khamenei's idea. He did not do anything to be above the fray. He talked
about the necessity of disqualification of "stiff neck" reformists
(especially 131 MPs who wrote a letter to him and warned him about
the violations of the rights of people by his appointed people) twice and
accused them as the mercenaries of the foreigners. He asked the Guardian
Council to act on the basis of law in disqualifications, while what this
Council does, in authoritarian reading of the constitution, is the law. In
the same speech he asked them to disqualify anyone who does not truly
believe in and act upon Islam. Everyone can be disqualified with resort to
this statement, even Khamenei. Khamenei is totally responsible for
any action of the appointed bodies of government: attacking university
dorms, disqualifications, vetting the bills of the parliament, prosecuting
and arresting political activists and putting them on trial, sentencing
intellectuals to death for what they have written or said about the
establishment, and closing the reformist media. People who are in these
bodies do not sip a drink of water without his permission. They know
his character.
ELAINE SCIOLINO wrote in NYT:
"So widespread is the belief that Iran has returned to the repression of
the monarchy that for over a year student protesters have been calling
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the spiritual leader and the country's most
powerful person, "Shah" Khamenei."
No Iranian inside and outside the country calls Khamenei "the spiritual
leader". There is no word like this in the constitution. This is totally
constructed by the Western journalists. Some of the Western journalists
call him "the supreme" or "the spiritual" leader. There is no word in the
political literature of reformists and even authoritarians to be
translated to these words. No one calls him in Persian "rahbar-e ma`navi"
or "rahbar-e mota`ali" or "rahbar-e `ali maqam". Reformists call him
"rahbar" or “maqam-e rahbari”, to avoid venerating a brutal mafialeadr,
and authoritarians call him "rahbar-e enqelab" (the leader of revolution)
or "rahbar-e mo`azzam" (the great leader). This is only about
the mistranslation.
In Iran, a Quiet but Fierce Struggle for Change By ELAINE SCIOLINO (NYT)
