Word: khamenei
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...most treacherous government is Britain," Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, intoned at Friday prayers on June 19, and I had to laugh. The Supreme Leader, in the midst of announcing a crackdown on the Green Revolution demonstrators, was sounding like the lead character in the most famous contemporary Iranian novel, My Uncle Napoleon, a huge hit as a television series in the 1970s. Uncle Napoleon is a beloved paranoid curmudgeon, the Iranian Archie Bunker. He blames everything - the weather, the economy, the moral vagaries of his family - on the British. This has been...
Will Larijani's public criticism of IRIB influence his successor? Though Zarghami is appointed by Khamenei and certainly loyal to him, analysts both in Iran and the West do not consider him unequivocally in Ahmadinejad's camp. Reformists in Tehran have said in recent years that a small cabal within IRIB works directly in tandem with Ahmadinejad but that the organization's political fidelity extends beyond the President. These distinctions help explain why IRIB agreed to air six debates during the presidential campaign, which was unprecedented in Iranian politics. The debates secured a rare prime-time opportunity for opposition candidates...
Under Iran's constitution, the Supreme Leader is responsible for appointing the head of IRIB, and typically Khamenei has chosen loyalists. When Larijani left the organization in 2004, he put forward one of his own trusted deputies, Ezatollah Zarghami. A former member of the Revolutionary Guards and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, Zarghami also worked with Larijani at the Guards' political directorate. Analysts say Zarghami's role there was to fashion a modern theoretical foundation for velayat-e faqih, the doctrine of absolute clerical rule on which Khamenei's authority rests...
...hour of anticipated demonstrations to try to keep people at home. "State media has always been hard-line and deceitful, but these days it's badly humiliating people," a 35-year-old resident of Tehran told me. "By all of this, it has become as hated as Khamenei and Ahmadinejad themselves." (See pictures of the Basij and other plainclothes terrors of Tehran...
...current level of antipathy toward IRIB, however, is unprecedented and proving worrisome to even staunch allies of Supreme Leader Khamenei. Ali Larijani, the current Speaker of parliament who formerly headed IRIB, recently said that "the IRIB should not act in a way that provokes people." Such rare criticism, especially from a key political figure who backed Ahamdinejad's electoral win on cue from Khamenei, suggests the delicate fissures within the regime's backing for the President...