Word: shahs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...flood of Christmas cards, a challenge to Khomeini, an exit for the Shah...
...Anwar Sadat thinks the Ayatullah is a lunatic, but, as Richard Nixon told a TV interviewer two weeks ago, "if he's crazy, he's crazy like a fox in one respect. He knows how to manipulate the media. He in effect has convicted the Shah in the minds of great numbers of Americans, as well as people throughout the world...
Nixon can never resist a chance to get in a lick at the press. About the Shah's fallen reputation, Nixon is dead right, but not simply because Khomeini manipulated the press: the Ayatullah has been able to take noisy advantage of a bizarre news brownout, a month of "self-restraint" unparalleled in American life. Johnny Carson confesses on TV that he is having a harder time with his opening monologues; Art Buchwald, who gets most of his humor columns out of topical events, hasn't done a single column about Iran. Even presidential candidates have been biting...
With their appetite for visual excitement, newscasts often open with the latest rant from the cross-legged Ayatullah, then move to shots of Death-to-the-Shah street crowds, who by now economically wave their fists most fervently when they see the camera's red light upon them. Next the "students" appear, enjoying the dream of every terrorist and airplane hijacker: to have television cameramen vying to record their loudest threats and wildest allegations. This has usually been balanced, if at all, by a brief low-key response from the State Department spokesman, and by the infrequent appearance...
...Shah has been the real loser. While hostages are in jeopardy, the only minidebate that has been allowed to erupt publicly is over who-let-the-Shah-in. When Carter's foreign policy again becomes fair game for partisan attack, it is doubtful that the strengths of the Shah's regime can ever be asserted as full-throatedly as before. Those televised sweeping panoramas of massed Iranians seem to dispute whatever public support the Shah once had. The Shah's secret police may not have tortured so widely or viciously as the Ayatullah's propagandists claim...