How the Islamic Republic terrorised Iran – and the world

After the blackout, the body bags. With the internet shut off in Iran, videos on our social-media feeds of thousands upon thousands of Iranians reclaiming their streets have given way to tentative reports of the fatalities. As many as 12,000 protesters are believed to have been killed in Iran, as the Islamic Republic and its thugs have set about putting down two weeks of mass demonstrations with a hail of bullets.

This is the true face of the Islamic Republic: the theocratic gangsters who have been squatting over a great civilisation since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. For all the Western useful idiocy that greeted Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power 47 years ago – ‘Iran may yet provide us with a desperately‐needed model of humane governance’, declared the New York Times – barbarism is in its DNA.

We saw it in the wake of February 1979, with the murders, arrests and purges not only of the opponents of the revolution, but also the moderates, liberals and leftists who had come together with the clerics to overthrow the shah. We saw it with the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), when the ayatollah sent waves of young boys across minefields to clear paths for attack, told they would become ‘martyrs’. Meanwhile, at home, those who drank were whipped, women were veiled and ‘anti-Islamic’ books were banned.

Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Khamenei, in power since 1989, has continued this brutal tradition. The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022 – sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, reportedly beaten to a pulp for failing to wear her hijab properly, was halted by the killing of at least 550 protesters and the arrests of some 20,000 more. Today’s unrest erupted first among the merchants of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, once a bedrock of regime support, before spreading across classes, peoples and provinces. Now the state hopes to drown it in blood.

And yet, amid all this, Iranians fight on, with a courage and radicalism bred of utter desperation. What began in response to soaring inflation and a tanking economy – presided over by corrupt and inept political elites who cannot even keep the water running – has swiftly morphed into an all-out rejection of the regime. There have been chants of ‘Death to the dictator!’ and ‘Long live the shah!’, a nod to the secular monarchy toppled in 1979. The memory of Savak, the authoritarian enforcers of the shah, has been eclipsed by the crimes of the ayatollah, and a nostalgia for what were, at least, freer and more prosperous times.

So much remains uncertain – above all, what a supposedly ‘locked and loaded’ Donald Trump intends to do. We must extend our solidarity, and will on these brave rebels to win, without succumbing to the blind optimism it is so easy to get swept up in from a safe distance, or blundering into an intervention that might prove to do more harm than good. But if the Iranians were ever to throw off the yoke of the Islamic Republic – and that remains a colossal ‘if’ – they would not just be liberating themselves. They would be ridding us all of a band of Islamist scumbags who have brutalised not just their own people, but also the world.

For all the phoney ‘anti-imperialists’ who have occasionally simped for the Islamic Republic, seeing it as some exotic bulwark against Western hegemony, it has long pursued its own Islamist imperialism across the Middle East. Hezbollah was founded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard following Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in 1982, and has been charged with menacing the Jewish State ever since. In the late-1980s, Iran courted Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Their full genocidal ambitions burst into the open on 7 October 2023, when they raped and murdered their way through southern Israel, to the rapturous approval of Tehran. Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen complete Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, pitted against America and the Jews – now brought low by Israeli and American bombs during the Gaza War, and by the ousting of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who had hosted its militants.

Beyond Tehran’s direct sponsorship of terror – which has extended into the West, too – the success of the Iranian Revolution became a symbol that the future belonged to political Islam. That another, barbaric world was possible. The Islamic Republic may have been a Shiite state, but insurgent Sunni groups took much inspiration from it, too. Ten months after the revolution, Sunni Islamists occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca, hoping to unseat a Saudi monarchy they saw as corrupted by the West and a Saudi clergy they saw as quietist and insufficiently Islamic. In turn, as Ali Ansari and Kasra Aarabi have noted, Khomeini’s efforts to spread the revolution, to stake a claim as the leader of a new global, Islamic vanguard, accelerated Saudi efforts to export its own Wahhabi ideology, ‘nurtur[ing] the rise of Sunni fundamentalism from Africa to the Far East’. We can also credit the ayatollah with effectively globalising anti-blasphemy violence, when he issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie on Valentine’s Day 1989, calling on Muslims the world over to murder the offending author.

Over five decades of infamy, the Islamic Republic has been a menace to life, limb and liberty far beyond Iran’s borders. What a moment for the world it would be if it were to fall.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.