Pepe Escobar: Meet Shah Ali Khamenei & more

There are insistent rumors in Tehran that the theo-political oligarchy supremacists are receiving crack counter-insurgency help from both Russia and China. Khamenei/Ahmadinejad/IRGC can always insist on turning Tehran into Tiananmen and prevail - for now. But Iran in 2009 has nothing to do with China in 1989. As for Mousavi, hurled in spite of himself into the eye of this historic hurricane, he now follows the human flow. The human flow has indicated that the supreme leader is illegitimate. His credibility as a religious scholar was and remains shaky. Now his credibility as supreme leader is shaky as well. Khamenei's central thesis of velayat-e-faqih (the rule of jurisprudence) was never a divine revelation (by the way, it was influenced by Khomeini's reading of human, oh-so-human Plato and Aristotle). It's just a particular Shi'ite interpretation of political Islam, according to which an Islamic jurisprudent has divine powers and rules absolutely surrounded by guardians. (Influential ayatollahs in Najaf, for instance, simply don't buy it). Now people are saying, "We have had enough of guardians". And they're also saying that the answer, my friend, is blowing in the rooftops. That's what people power is collectively thinking: if God is great, he's got to allow us democracy within Islam. As for the supreme leader, he is now naked. Mousavi may not be Khomeini. But Khamenei increasingly is remixing himself as the shah.

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