Middle Israel: The life and times of Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – opinion

As it were, the Islamist Revolution caught Khamenei at age 40, a perfect age for that cataclysm to send him to a future of which he had not dreamt. Born to a cleric, Khamenei arrived in the holy city of Qom in 1958, where he became a student of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Having unseated the shah, the supreme leader made his protégé a member of the Council of the Islamic Revolution, deputy defense minister, and his personal representative on the Supreme Defense Council before making him president of Iran at age 42.

Throughout it all, Khamenei claimed moral superiority over “the West.” That is how, for instance, in a public address in Kermanshah in 2011, Khamenei said in reference to the 2008 financial meltdown on Wall Street: “The crisis of the West has begun in earnest.”

The source of Khamenei’s defiance was Egyptian political theorist Sayyid Qutb, the prophet of modern Islamism whose writings Khamenei translated into Farsi. “Ultimately, world government shall be in the hands of our school,” he wrote in his introduction to Qutb’s The Future of This Religion.

Much more harshly, in an address to public-sector managers in 2002, Khamenei asked, after recommending that they read Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Wasn’t it this system and its agents who seized millions of Africans from their houses and carried them off into slavery, and kidnapped their young sons and daughters to become slaves, and inflicted on them for long years the most severe tragedies?”

So deeply was the wasted literary critic moved by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s masterpiece that he lamented what in his view was “one of the most tragic works of art,” one that “still lives, after almost 200 years.”

The book was actually 150 years old at the time, and Khamenei conveniently ignored America’s war on slavery and slavery’s existence in Iran until 1929, but the message was still effective: the West abused the innocent deliberately and systematically, and was but a version of the ancient cult of Moloch.

As president, he helped deflect Saddam Hussein’s invasion, and as supreme leader, he allowed the family planning that Khomeini forbade. Fertility rates, which on the eve of the revolution stood at 6.6 births per woman, plummeted to 1.67 today. Iran, whose population swelled from less than 40 million in 1979 to more than 90 million today, thus avoided a population explosion.

The rest of his record was catastrophic. Per capita product has plunged from more than $7,300 to $4,700. More than half of working-age citizens are jobless, according to The Economist, and nearly one-fifth are below the World Bank’s poverty line. The rial has tumbled from 300 to the dollar to more than 1.5 million for one greenback.

Meanwhile, Khamenei let the Revolutionary Guards own much of the energy, construction, and banking industries. With all this coming at the expense of planning, investment, and enterprise, Khamenei’s Iran lost much of its water and electricity. Lake Urmia, once the largest in the Middle East, shrank by 90% due to thoughtless damming and unregulated pumping.

One might assume all this is ultimately a failure of strategy and management. It actually is all that, but it is underpinned by the moral failure of the man who habitually preached to the infidel West.

Khamenei's leadership has been a moral tragedy in three acts.

First, he wasted the people’s money in two ways. On the one hand, he blocked development by giving the economy to the regime’s cronies, and on the other hand, he used the people’s money to build militias in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, and to create a nuclear bomb.

Then the self-professed humanist who lamented the abuse of America’s Blacks began killing foreigners. What began with 241 Americans in Beirut in 1983 proceeded to 114 Argentinians and Israelis in Buenos Aires, and culminated in hundreds of thousands of Arabs killed in the Syrian, Iraqi, and Yemeni civil wars.

And then the sanctimonious Islamist’s killing career reached its climax, as he turned his guns on his own people, the citizens whose money, food, and honor he robbed, massacring them by the thousands on their cities’ streets.

The admirer of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the story about Jean Valjean, who spent 19 years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his impoverished sister’s kids – thus arrived at the epilogue of Khamenei’s biography.

Now Jean Valjean is staring at Ali Khamenei’s window – his body strewn on the sidewalk, his pockets penniless, his stomach foodless, his forehead punctured, his heart no longer beating, but burning nonetheless; burning with the fire that the high priest of Moloch kindled, while dressed in the cloth of a man of God.