Reading IAEA in Tehran

Weekly Standard ^ | Nov. 21, 2011 | Reuel Marc Gerecht

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Iranians have never regarded clerics​—​except perhaps the most accomplished scholars​—​as ever being above sin. They are lawyers who, as the great poet Hafez famously remarked, “don’t practice in private what they preach in public.”

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Khamenei’s nuclear fatwa was not to be taken seriously. It was meant partly for Western consumption. More important, it reflected the surreal Islam-vs.-the-West theater that is a never-ending spectacle in the Islamic Republic. America unleashed the atom bomb in war; the Islamic Republic wouldn’t do such a thing. The West is overflowing with homosexuals; in Iran, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad informed the students of Columbia University in 2007, “We don’t have that.”

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The same for Khamenei on the nuclear issue. Khamenei lives in two worlds: In one, his minions work arduously to build nuclear weapons; in the other they do research on medical isotopes. In one, he sends his minions abroad to slaughter Jews in Argentina, blow up Americans at Khobar Towers, liaise with al Qaeda, and in all probability assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C.; in the other, he’s defending the Palestinian people and all Muslims against aggressive Zionists, peacefully deploring the presence of American troops in Arabia, condemning the bigotry of Sunni extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, and revealing to all the long track record of American terrorism inside Iran. Khamenei moves between these two worlds effortlessly, without friction, without awareness that he’s crossed the border between fiction and fact.

The Iranian media’s coverage of the IAEA report reflects Khamenei’s most cherished conception of himself and his country. That conception is dangerous because it is insular, disconnected from and at odds with reality as understood in the West. When the supreme leader gets his hands on a nuclear weapon, this self-centeredness may get much worse.

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The West is overflowing with homosexuals; in Iran, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad informed the students of Columbia University in 2007, “We don’t have that.”

IRI keeps the "overflow" to a minimum by executing them. Alternatively, the regime fully pays for "sex reassignment surgery" -- see history section in this link.