The planned presence of the Iranian regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei in the ‘joint graduation ceremony for the cadets studying in the academies of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Armed Forces’ was considered a failure, as it did not bring him the expected ‘power’ that the regime wanted to present in the middle of the nationwide protests.
During his speeches, the signs of weakness were clearly evident on his face. One of the signs was his complaints about the ruling head’s contradictions, which he could not ignore. Khamenei knows very well that they will intensify in the future.
This could be seen in this part of his speech, “At first, some (cleric) elites made announcements and statements without investigation and probably out of compassion. Some of them blamed the law enforcement agency and some blamed the system. Now that they have seen what the matter is and what happened in the streets because of their words in parallel with the planning of the enemy, they should make up for their work and clearly declare that they are against what happened and the plan of the foreign enemy.”
While many officials remained silent, only Ahmad Janati and Hassan Khomeini responded to the regime’s supreme leader’s desperate request.
Even the Islamic Association of Students of the Sharif University of Technology confronted him on the night of October 2, when the regime’s special forces and plain clothes officers attacked, surrounded, beat, and injured many of the Sharif University students.
In their statement, they wrote, “The students who sat in for the second day in a row, and exercised their right to protest following a hollow promise by the president of the university to release all the imprisoned Sharif students who were arrested last week, suddenly faced a barrage of security officers and plainclothes officers who, in a tremendous act, besieged the university and attacked students and professors with all kinds of weapons.”
They added, “Behind this blatant violence, it seems that there was a pre-planned scenario to silence the voices of protesting students, and Sharif University was supposed to be a lesson for the rest of the country’s universities and, of course, to satisfy the greed of some extremists.”
The day after Khamenei’s desperate statements, in a statement published by the state-run Setareh-e Sobh daily, cleric Mohammad Ali Ayazi said, “Some of the clerics do not accept the guidance patrol and say that this is not a way to make the society religious. Some things that are done in the name of religion are not acceptable from the point of view of some religious thinkers and researchers.”
The current situation is so against Khamenei, that even the spokesperson of the regime’s ‘Enjoining good and forbidding wrong’ headquarters stated, “We have said several times, this kind of treatment by the guidance patrol or some concerned people, would maybe have worked in the 80s, but now we can no longer force people to submit to the hijab law with violent treatment.”
This desperation among the regime’s forces is the result of the Iranian people’s resistance over the past years, especially through the involvement of Iranian women of all ages.
In a speech by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf in the Expediency Council, it gives a clear picture of the regime’s viewpoint. He stated, “If we want to overcome this cognitive war, we first need to correct these conflicts and these different perceptions and understandings in this part of governance. This is the platform that the enemy uses because of its inefficiency and creates these problems.”
This situation has also affected the effectiveness of repression and is widening the gap between the regime’s forces and the people of Iran.
