Understanding Western Grief for the ‘Butcher of Tehran

On Monday, something peculiar happened.

The president of Iran, an evil human being nicknamed the Butcher of Tehran, died in a helicopter accident on Sunday. One of the worst people on earth, he presided as a member of the Iranian pseudo-judiciary over the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

He presided over the crushing of all dissent from women and people who do not believe in Sharia law in Iran. He presided over the deaths of thousands of American troops and attacks on American allies. His proxy groups around the region have been involved in the deaths of thousands of human beings, including, of course, the 1,200 Israelis murdered on October 7 with the tacit permission and support of Iran via Hamas.

Then, on Monday, after he died in this helicopter accident, the immediate reception of the West was to lament his death. This was unprecedented in modern history.

For example, when Pol Pot, the genocidal dictator of Cambodia, died, Bill Clinton issued a statement ripping into Pol Pot. He stated:

The death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot has again brought to international attention one of the most tragic chapters of inhumanity in the twentieth century. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers transformed Cambodia into the killing fields, causing the death of an estimated 2 million of their countrymen in a brutal attempt to transform Cambodian society.

Bill Clinton was a Democrat, a moderate member of the Left, and he used the opportunity of Pol Pot’s death to point out his evils and the human rights atrocities that he had committed. Historically, this has been the way we treat evil dictators and people associated with evil dictatorships; when they die, the world becomes a better place.

In 2023, when speaking at the United Nations, Raisi fully explained his intentions for the world, which was the domination of a radical form of Islam. He explained to the whole world that the era of the West was over, and the era of the Islamist was here:

The equation attributed to the hegemony of the West no longer resonates with the diverse realities of today’s world. Old powers will keep their current downward trajectory. They are the past, and we are the future. I repeat once again, they represent the past and we represent the future. We are the future. We do believe that according to divine will, just as divine prophets have promised, justice and fairness will overtake the world and the rule of the sincere people, those who truly followed the path of the Omnipotent, will reverberate throughout the world. A world that rejects ignorance. The world awaits the day in which the old paths will come to an end.

Raisi was talking about the messianic beliefs of Shia Islam. He gave a speech in February 2024 in which he ripped into the United States as millions of people turned out in rallies chanting, “Death to Israel, Death to America.”

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So what is the explanation for the reaction of the West?

The U.N. Security Council held a moment of silence for Ebrahim Raisi. The entire U.N. Security Council stood up for him, which is vile and disgusting.

The Senate chaplain, Rear Admiral Barry Black held a moment of prayer for the Iranian dictator, intoning, “Lord, we pray for the Iranian people who mourn the death of their president. We pray in your loving name. Amen.”

The State Department put out a statement that was beyond parody, saying, “The United States expresses its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran. As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Do you see how far we’ve moved? Pol Pot dies and Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat, gives a statement about his human rights abuses and why it should remind us to fight human rights abuses in places like Cambodia.

Ebrahim Raisi is president in a regime that presides over terrorism across the world, and the State Department of the United States government puts out a statement with condolences for his death.

The EU did the same. Charles Michel, who is the president of the European Council, put out a statement which read, “The EU expresses its sincere condolences for the death of President Raisi and Foreign Minister Abdollahian, as well as other members of their delegation and crew in a helicopter accident. Our thoughts go to the families.”

How about the families of the people who have been slain in protests against the Iranian dictatorship? How about thoughts for the families of the people who are living in repression and poverty, thanks to those dictators?

NATO, which is oriented against aggression by foreign powers, stated, “Our condolences to the people of Iran for the death of President Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian and others who perished in the helicopter crash.”

The people of Iran don’t need your condolences. The people of Iran deserve your condolences for having to live under the terroristic auspices of this evil regime.

This is insanity. The entire West could have just stayed silent. They could have said nothing. Instead, they all came to the “moment of silence.”

There was no moment of silence in the UN Security Council for the victims of October 7. They did not stand up and pay homage to the 1,200 people who were slaughtered and 250 who were taken hostage by the terrorist group Hamas.

But they did stand to pay homage to a terrorist dictator who supported October 7 and proxy terror groups from Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Hamas.

What is going on in the West that Western leaders feel the necessity to give condolences on the death of an evil enemy?

There is an error in thinking that has become extraordinarily common in the West that leads to so many bad results. This error in thinking was made clear yesterday by Pope Francis. In his 60 Minutes interview, when asked what gave him hope, he said:

Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams. Women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead and people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.

There are three ways of reading human nature. The traditional Judaic way of reading human nature is that human beings are not inherently good. Human beings have an internal battle. That battle is between what we call the yetzer ha-tov, the good desire, and the yetzer ha-ra, the bad desire. These two things are fighting with each other all the time, and it is up to us to try to cultivate the good desire at the expense of the bad desire. If you do it well, presumably you can even turn the bad desires toward the good.

Then there is the Catholic perspective, as stated by St. Thomas Aquinas, which is that human beings are inherently good in the sense they were made in God’s image, but through Original Sin, human beings were then cursed with the capacity for sin. That capacity for sin is dominant and powerful, and Original Sin could only be expunged with the death of Jesus.

The secularist idea is that human beings are inherently good, and not only are they inherently good, most human beings are not even sinful.

That is at odds with both the Judaic and the traditionally Christian view of human nature.

The traditionally Christian worldview on human nature is that while the human heart might be made in the image of God — meaning that on a fundamental soul level, the soul of human beings is good — the Bible is replete with statements about how sinful human beings are. But whether you’re talking about the book of Mark, where Jesus said no one is good except God alone; Romans where he said none are good, no, not one; Jeremiah, where the prophet says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; or Psalms 51:5 which says, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me,” the traditionally religious view, at the very least, is that the human capacity for sin is extraordinarily strong — and that means all people are inherently sinners.

The solution to that differs between Judaism and Christianity. The solution to that for Judaism is to perform the mitzvot and act in virtuous ways, and you will become more virtuous and you will dominate over sin. As God says to Cain at the beginning of the book of Genesis, sin crouches at your door, but if you’re strong, you can rule over it.

The Christian perspective is: Only through the grace of Christ can you expunge that Original Sin, giving you the capacity for a free will so that you can conquer sinful nature.

Then, there’s the secularist point of view, which is different from both of these and is a mis-read of Judeo-Christian tradition. The basic idea is that human beings are not only inherently good — not only is the heart inherently good — but sin is also not something internal to human beings. It’s not even a force that human beings fight on an individual level. Sin only exists in systems, not in individual human beings. There’s no such thing as sin. Human beings have a nature, and that nature is inherently good. And if you consider something sinful, it’s probably because you are the problem.

You see this in secular society all the time. If two people love each other, how can it be a sin? If you do something bad to another person, that’s just relativistic. It’s relativistic in morality. Who are you to judge?

All of that is a misreading of traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine. All of it.

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But that widespread secular perception — that human beings are inherently good and that the only problem with human beings is the systems above them — leads to two incredibly false conclusions.

The first fundamental assumption is: Human beings generally agree on right and wrong. This is a lie. It is not true. It is fundamentally false. Human beings do not agree on right and wrong.

There are very few things most human beings agree on (for example, murder is wrong), and, traditionally, even that has to be bounded by the tribe because it turns out that people and tribes are pretty open about being fine with murdering people who are in other tribes. Human beings do not, at a fundamental level, agree on wide aspects of right and wrong — at least not once it comes to outside the tribe.

The second fundamental assumption that arises from the idea that human beings are good is: All it requires is better human institutions and an organizing effort to effectuate right over wrong. Progress is the effectuation of this attempt.

That is the basic Left-wing theology when it comes to curing the sin of the world, considering sin does not abide at the level of the individual; sin only abides at the level of the society. It is the Marxist materialist idea that the only reason people are bad is because the systems under which they live are inherently bad and corrupt, and therefore, if we can cure those systems, then humanity will be magically and absolutely transformed.

This is written in the Communist Manifesto. What people mistake about Marxism is that it’s not an economic philosophy so much as it is a religious philosophy as to how the sin of the world can be cured by curing the systems at the top level.

When put into the language of international politics, this leads to a bizarre belief in international order that is just a lie.

This is why the West is paying homage to Ebrahim Raisi. They feel in the West, if they are nice enough to Raisi and if they change the systems enough, then people like Raisi, his followers, and the mullahs in Iran will become inherently good. In other words, they’ll become inherently good if we change the international order because human beings are naturally good.

This is absolute trash. It is nonsense. It is garbage. And it is going to create more violence in the world.

If you believe all you have to do is massage your enemies and suddenly they will be your friends, you will be used by your enemies.

And that is what we are seeing right now.

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