A New Storm in Tehran

Storming the Embassy
originally uploaded by Gileskirk

The surprising election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's new president this week has elicited a great deal of hand-ringing analysis by Western journalists. As a result, we have learned that Ahmadinejad, currently the mayor of Tehran, is a Shi’ite fundamentalist, that he is a hardliner socially and politically, that he is an ardent believer in Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution of 1978-9, that he wants to return his nation to the Ayatollah's radical Islamicist principles, that almost no one in or out of Iran expected him to win the election, that almost every one in and out of Iran now suspects sweeping electoral fraud, and that none of this bodes well for the rest of the world.

What the media has failed to tell us though is perhaps the single most telling fact about Ahmadinejad’s past: he was one of the founders of the powerful Abadgaran. Not familiar with the Abadgaran? You should be. Part student activist group, part political party, and part terrorist cell, they were the young radicals who swarmed over the wall of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 and then held the diplomats and embassy workers hostage for 444 days. In one sense, the Abadgaran held the whole world captive then. But, in a much more terrifying sense they have held the people of Iran captive ever since—they are the Islamicist extremists who set up roving militias, answerable only to the Mullahs and Ayatollahs, who have plagued the lives of ordinary Iranians right up to the present day.

Dressing alike, with their dark suits, their scruffy beards, and their dingy open-necked shirts as well as thinking alike with their passionate anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and mis-Anthropism, the Abadgaran are the most frightening movement within Islam since al Quaeda and the Taliban.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the early leading lights of the Abadgaran. He was one of their spokesmen in the heady days when the Ayatollah Khomeini still reigned supreme from his throne in Qom. He was their champion. He was their most vehement visionary. And now, he is their president.

The mainstream media has failed to focus on any of this information. Thus far, only the BBC has even mentioned it—and then only in passing. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?