Exiled Ayatollah: Iranian Regime on Verge of Collapse
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
As the country is busy speculating whether the brand new Benjamin Netanyahu-led government will end up going to war with Iran, a former member of Iran’s Khomeini government has said that Israelis are over-estimating the life expectancy of the Iranian regime.
“I guarantee that within two years Iran’s regime will collapse,” Ayatollah Dr Mehdi Haeri Khorshidi told an audience at an international conference at Haifa University called “Looking at Iran.”
Khorshidi, who now lives in exile in Los Angeles, was justice minister in Khomeini’s first government and was imprisoned for five years after that for criticizing the regime. He said: “Iran has powers that can stun and even defeat the government. There are other elements that wish to separate state and religion.
“They see that as long as Islamic rule forcibly clings to the government, religion is connected with all that is bad, which harms [the religion]. These elements include religious persons, university lecturers, judges, and members of parliament.” He added: “We need no foreign element to replace the regime for us. We can and must do it alone.” Once the regime is replaced, the Ayatollah predicted, the new government will be on friendly terms with Israel too.
He said of the state of academia and culture in Iran: “Fifty percent of the university openings are reserved for people associated with the government, and in order to be accepted in the remaining places, the candidates must undergo tests that are of political character and not at all related to the study material.
“A respected 106-year-old Ayatollah, who can no longer see or hear, determined that using satellite is forbidden since it provides only sex-related films. For fifteen years, it was forbidden to use video machines, because the religious bodies feared that the youth would use them to view sex films. Thankfully, today the thirty million youths are less interested in the government’s propaganda against the West.”
Khorshidi said that the poor state of the Iranian economy is bad news for the government. “Prices go up twice a day and inflation is higher than 50 percent,” he said. “In the past we have seen despotic regimes that have been able to survive for extended periods, but there the financial situation was reasonable. Due to the impossible financial state of affairs in Iran, along with the youths’ desires, the only thing that preserves the regime is the military – but how long can this situation continue?”
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