Free Republic

When anti-regime protests spread like wildfire throughout Iran in mid-October of 2022, the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was quick to lay the blame on the usual foreign suspects. “I say explicitly that these riots and this insecurity were a design by the U.S. and the occupying, fake Zionist regime and those who are paid by them,” he told a class of cadets at a police college in Tehran. He suggested that the ultimate goal of the U.S. and Israel was regime change in Iran. This elicited a response on Twitter from Iranian rapper Hichkas, who defended foreign support for...

Let me first preface my remarks by stating for the record that I didn't attend this demonstration in order to voice support for a particular faction in the Iranian democracy movement, and was-quite honestly-surprised by the extent to which the MEK/NCRI had monopolized the crowd that had gathered in the shadow of the United Nations General Assembly in order to protest the visit to this country by a man who is the president of what is-bar none-the leading state sponsor of international terrorism. The minute you entered the rally you began to spot the nearly beatific images of Maryam Rajavi...