Posted on 02/13/2018 9:45:48 AM PST by GoldenState_Rose
Last month, with mass protests underway on the streets of Tehran and other cities, one of Iran’s most senior clerics inadvertently sparked an altogether different sort of international incident.
On January 8, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, one of the country’s most powerful officials and a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, traveled to Germany to receive medical treatment amid rumors of failing health. The visit prompted outrage from human-rights activists, and German authorities contemplated charging Shahroudi for “crimes against humanity” for his role in directing the imprisonment and torture of numerous opponents of the Iranian regime. The sixty-nine-year-old jurist ultimately decided to flee the Federal Republic in order to avoid the fallout.
The episode, however fleeting, tells us a great deal about Iran’s future, and about the generational transition now looming over the Islamic Republic. Shahroudi, after all, is hardly the only ailing Iranian ayatollah.
The advanced age and growing infirmity of Iran’s senior leadership is all the more striking when compared with the country’s population as a whole. Over 60 percent of Iran’s eighty-two million citizens are currently thirty-five years of age or younger, born after the events of 1979 propelled Iran’s clerical ruling class to power. This cohort has no recollection of the Islamic Revolution, and lacks the ideological bonds that would tether it securely to the current regime in Tehran.
It does, however, know exactly what it is missing. With nearly half of all Iranians now possessing access to the Internet, the Islamic Republic ranks as one of the most wired nations in the Middle East. This penetration, coupled with decades of access to foreign media, culture and commerce, has made the Iranian people painfully aware of their own government’s shortcomings. It’s no wonder that Iran’s leaders have come to see Western influence as a mortal threat.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
The old rulers have the guns.
Old rulers will prevail.
-— “The old rulers have the guns.
-— Old rulers will prevail.”
Old rulers give their guns to young soldiers, and the middle-east has a long history of young soldiers turning their guns against the ruling dictators.
Thanks GoldenState_Rose.
The Arabs, who are against the old rulers, can supply all the guns to the population.
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