Then and Now, Leftists Bowed Before Iranian Anti-Semites
Then and Now, Leftists Bowed Before Iranian Anti-Semites

It is a mystery how the Iranian Imam was able to attract the ranks of European and US leftists, libertines and materialists, structuralists and feminists, existentialists and militants of the sexual revolution, post-modernists and bourgeois moralists, and any kind of Communist.

Thirty years ago large segments of European culture bowed in front of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This also explains the way today's European and American liberal intelligentsia are enthusiastic about the nuclear deal signed in Vienna. 

Leftist Intellectuals turned Khomeini into the religious antagonist of reactionary monarch Reza Pahlevi,accused of stealing and killing its own people. The left saw Khomeini in the guise of a vindicator, his beard like that of Che Guevara, in the act of driving away the reactionary and pro-American Shah. 

The historian of the French Revolution Claude Manceron visited him and compared Khomeini to a David triumphing over Goliath.
In his Parisian exile of Neauphle- le-Chateau, from the chalet in the hills a few kilometers from the capital Paris, Khomeini was sought night and day by journalists and intellectuals of the Left. For weeks there, the house of Neauphle-le-Chateau and the adjoining tent-mosque were turned into the headquarters of the Islamic revolution and its international press center. Between a cup of tea and a slice of nougat, the willing followers of the Ayatollah sought to explain to the rest of the world the ideas of Khomeini.

Five times a day, Khomeini came out from his retirement, crossed the street, and entered the chalet to perform the prayers. The philosopher Louis Rougier and the historian of the French Revolution Claude Manceron visited him and compared Khomeini to a David triumphing over Goliath.

Andrew Young, the ambassador to the United Nations under the Carter Administration, said that Khomeini was "a saint, a Social Democrat saint" and compared his revolution in the name of Allah to the American movement for civil rights. The Ambassador to Tehran, William Sullivan, compared the imam to Gandhi. The consultant of Jimmy Carter, Bill James, wrote that Ayatollah had to be admired "as a man of integrity."

Richard Falk, jurist from Princeton and future UN envoy in the Middle East, led the American mission in the suburb of Paris and hailed Khomeini as "a new model of popular revolution based, in large part, on nonviolent tactics". The Iranian expert Richard Cottam in the Washington Post called Khomeini "moderate, centrist", a hermit who was not interested in power. who would, once he defeated the Shah, retire in the holy city of Qom.

The exact opposite is, of course, what happened.

As Houchang Nahavan, former minister of the Shah and author of "Iran, the Clash of Ambitions" said: "Many leftist movements of Europe sent their delegations to the international conference held in Tehran in favor of the operation of the hostages of 4 November 1979." From France, the gay poet Jean Genet, unaware of what the mullahs did to homosexuals, expressed great sympathy for Khomeini because he had dared to oppose  the West.

The journalist André Fontaine, director of the Monde, compared Khomeini to John Paul II in an article entitled "The Return of the divine" while the philosopher Jacques Madaule, re-defining the role of Khomeini, said that "his movement will open the doors to the future of humanity", defining Khomeinism as a "clamor from the depths of the times" who refuted "slavery."

Michel Foucault, in the famous articles in the Corriere della Sera and the Nouvel Observateur, was able to commend the impressive achievement of Khomeini as "the first of the Grand insurrection against global systems, the most modern form of revolt". The same Jean-Paul Sartre, guru of the Left, decided to go in person to Tehran to sustain publicly, with a great reinforcement of publicity, the wild-eyed imam.

One of the most famous envoys of Le Monde, Eric Rouleau, was mad about Khomeini. L'Humanité, organ of the French Communists, called the imam "the Islamic Lenin". The French Socialist Party organized a public demonstration of support for Khomeini on January 23, 1979 at the Maison de la Chimie. The future prime minister Lionel Jospin, lyrical and mystical, on that occasion quoted Imam Ali as "the enemy of all the oppressors and the friend of the oppressed ." On 14 February 1979 the French Socialists hailed the victory of the Islamic revolution as "unprecedented in history."

At the outbreak of the revolution, the female veil became the symbol of resistance to the "monarchical despotism" and all "western imperialism."  Many Western feminists traveled to Tehran, including the American Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir, who chaired an "International Committee of the rights of women." In the delegation were Claire Brière, Sylvie Caster, Catherine Clément, Martine Franck, Françoise Gaspard, Paula Jacques, Katia Kaupp, Michèle Le Mans, Gaëlle Montlahuc, Michael Perrain, Micheline Pelletier-Lattès, Alice Schwarzer, Martine Storti, Anne Tristan, Hélène Védrine. 

Soon after the departure of correspondents and intellectuals from Tehran, Khomeini imposed the veil on all women, attacked the American Embassy, started beheading people and launched an unprecedented death edict against a Western writer (Salman Rushdie). No one protested the ensuing persecution of Jews, Bahais, Zoroastrians, Ishmaelites, Kurds, Armenians and Arabs of the South, who for years have been persecuted, tortured and murdered amidst general international indifference.

Neauphle-le-Château was the first mistake of the West and its intellectual orientalists. It was there, in a suburb of Paris, that the old imam began to burn the world. With the complicity of many useful idiots.