RUTHFULLY YOURS

About 50 Iranian protesters screaming “Death to England!” climbed the wall surrounding the British embassy in Tehran, entered the building, and scattered some files. At the same time, two or three hundred students gathered in the street. According to most reports, the police stood and watched. Of course they did. Demonstrations of this kind are organized by the authorities. It’s time off and a nice little earner for all participants. Capture the embassy, and they might be allowed to live in it with all expenses paid for months, like the lucky gang once before in the American embassy.

These Iranian protestors are always shouting death to someone — to the United States, to Britain, to Israel, to Saddam Hussein in old days, to poor old Salman Rushdie — and there must be quite a production of the requisite flags for them to burn. The rhetoric makes them look stuck in medieval mindlessness. A firm belief in conspiracy further testifies to it. Walls used to be defaced with the graffiti, “Khomeini, Tool of the British.” The ayatollah had done such damage to Iran, in other words, that he must have been a secret British agent. What a one-track man he was. The great Oriana Fallaci asked him what he thought of Bach and Beethoven. Those names, he answered, were not familiar to him.

His successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, still singles Britain out as “an icon of Western imperialist arrogance.” He thinks Britain has destroyed his cultural heritage when it has in fact done a great deal to rescue it. Evidently he has not heard of Henry Rawlinson roped up on the cliff face at Isfahan to record the ancient hieroglyphs; he does not know about the explorer Armin Vambéry, Professor E.G.Browne and his enthusiastic book A Year Among the Persians, or the throng of politicians, officials, and scholars from Lord Curzon and Sir Percy Sykes to Anne Lambton who one way and another publicized and interpreted the Persian heritage.

In the course of some research, I discovered that the ayatollahs had invariably written nothing except commentaries on the commentaries of others. Only a single one out of more than a hundred had chosen a subject after 1800. This ignorance from above drives the ignorance below. It is also the reason why Islamism in general, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in particular, will come to nothing. The mind-set can be expressed as “Death to creativity and invention.”

Actually, I suspect that those slogan-shouters outside the embassy are well aware that they have been put up to something worthless, and it would take very little to have them shouting meaningfully and without bakshish, “Death to the mullahs!” That was the cry in the Green Revolution a couple of years ago. The Jimmy Carters and Barack Obamas of the world do their best to appease and flatter the foolish clerics instead of showing the courage that would oblige them to change. Fifteen British sailors simply surrendered to Iranian hijackers in the Persian Gulf. The Foreign Office can’t do better than mumble about the embassy invasion being “utterly unacceptable,” when action is required to put a limit to the very real imperialist arrogance that does such harm to Iranians and so many others.