A Murderous Deception in Tehran Marks a New Escalation in the Islamic Republic’s Struggle for Survival

Michael Ledeen
Faster Please (PJTV)
12 January '10

(As opposed to the original news reports emanating from Iran, which hinted at Israeli or U.S involvement, now a different picture is emerging. Michael Ledeen is not alone in this opinion.)

Early Tuesday morning — sometime between 7:30 and 8 o’clock — physics professor Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was killed in an explosion while in his automobile leaving for Tehran University. The explosion came from a motorcycle rigged with explosives that had been parked in front of his house for three days. It was detonated by remote control.

Despite a torrent of disinformation from the regime, Ali-Mohammadi was not involved in the secret nuclear weapons project, and — again contrary to the regime’s lies — he was certainly not a regime loyalist. Indeed, he was among many university professors who supported Green leader Mir Hossein Mousavi during last spring’s heated electoral campaign (see the entry at 1259 GMT on Enduring America). Why was he killed now? Because he was planning to leave the country for Stockholm, where he’d been offered a one-year fellowship in his chosen specialty, particle physics.

So unless the killers were totally confused, this was not a blow at the regime by its enemies, whether domestic or foreign (as you can imagine, there were all sorts of wild accusations from official media, blaming the murder on America, Israel, the MEK, which plays the crocodile to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s Captain Hook and obscure “royalist” organizations abroad), but rather the opposite: it was a vicious assault by the regime against one of its critics.

The use of the motorcycle is suggestive, for such devices were used by Iranian proxies in Iraq. I am told that the assassination is the first such act on Iranian soil by the Revolutionary Guard’s “foreign legion;” highly trained killers from Lebanese Hezbollah. Members of the legion had participated in street fighting in Tehran during recent demonstrations and were identified at the assassination site. Their bloody act Tuesday morning suggests that Khamenei has decided to go all out to crush his enemies. If further confirmation is required, it has come from Khamenei’s personal spokesman and representative to the Guards, Ali Saeedi, who, we hear from Scott Lucas at Enduring America, has reportedly declared that the the deaths of 75,000 people will be worthwhile if the Islamic Republic is thereby preserved.

As if the carnage unleashed against the Iranian people were not bloody enough! So we can expect to see further escalation in the near future. The regime can be expected to use the disinformation about Ali-Mohammadi’s assassination to justify mayhem on a greater scale.

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