An exiled Iranian theater director says the Iranian regime will soon fall, and that an Israeli attack will rally sagging Iranian morale.
Dr. Mahmoud Karimi-Hakak, currently in Israel, says that Israel should sit tight and wait for the current hostile Iranian regime to fall. “If the situation continues as it is now, the regime in Iran will be replaced,” the film director said at Haifa University’s Azari Center for the Study of Iran and the Gulf.
Dr. Karimi-Hakak has been teaching in recent years in American universities. He left Iran after authorities began investigating him for having produced a Shakespeare play without permission.
Iran’s “Green Movement,” the grassroots anti-government protest wave, “has no director,” Karimi-Hakak said. “There is a growing gap between the Iranian people and its leaders; the public is pushing them, and not the opposite… In every activity, there is a link with at least two of the three movement leaders – [Mir Hussein] Mousavi, [Mehdi] Karroubi and [Mohammad] Khatami. This way, none of them will become the immediate leader after the regime falls.”
Karimi-Hakak explains that the giant demonstrations in favor of President Ahmedinajad are easily explained: “About 15% of the country truly support the religious regime, or benefit financially from it. Another 15% are government workers who are obligated to arrive at the rallies or else they will be fired. Another 5-10% are prisoners, drug addicts and the like who made a deal that if they show up at the rallies, their sentences will be reduced. And this is how they get tens of thousands at their rallies.”
The visiting Iranian has some advice for Israel and the West: Sit tight. “They should not intervene directly in the struggles between the protestors and the regime, but should rather help indirectly by banning Iranian leaders’ visits, freezing their accounts, and the like… After the original revolution [against the Shah], Khomeini marked the U.S. as the enemy, thus uniting the nation. Afterwards it was Iraq that was the enemy that united the nation. I am sure that the heads of the regime pray every day that Israel will attack, thus uniting the people again against an outside enemy. Therefore I beg of you: Don’t intervene.”