Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from the same sources. Yet from the time of the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, West and Islam have confronted each other by turns in attitudes of incomprehension, greed, fanaticism, prurient interest, fear and loathing. The drama has lost none of its historic tension in the stagecraft of the Ayatullah Khomeini. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," he has told the faithful. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidel." At such moments, the Imam takes on the wild and grainy aspect of a dire Mohammedan prophet by DeMille...
After the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian radicals, some of Washington's Middle East experts predicted that this outrageous violation of international custom would brand Ayatullah Khomeini as a pariah in the Islamic world. The experts were wrong. Certainly the majority of Khomeini's neighboring rulers disapprove of the embassy invasion and the holding of diplomatic hostages. But the denunciations of the Ayatullah have not been as loud or as specific as the U.S. would like. That is partly because Khomeini's skill at rousing Iranian mobs to a pitch of zealotry...
Egypt's Anwar Sadat thinks the Ayatullah is a lunatic, but, as Richard Nixon told a TV interviewer two weeks ago, "if he's crazy, he's crazy like a fox in one respect. He knows how to manipulate the media. He in effect has convicted the Shah in the minds of great numbers of Americans, as well as people throughout the world...
Nixon can never resist a chance to get in a lick at the press. About the Shah's fallen reputation, Nixon is dead right, but not simply because Khomeini manipulated the press: the Ayatullah has been able to take noisy advantage of a bizarre news brownout, a month of "self-restraint" unparalleled in American life. Johnny Carson confesses on TV that he is having a harder time with his opening monologues; Art Buchwald, who gets most of his humor columns out of topical events, hasn't done a single column about Iran. Even presidential candidates have been biting...
With their appetite for visual excitement, newscasts often open with the latest rant from the cross-legged Ayatullah, then move to shots of Death-to-the-Shah street crowds, who by now economically wave their fists most fervently when they see the camera's red light upon them. Next the "students" appear, enjoying the dream of every terrorist and airplane hijacker: to have television cameramen vying to record their loudest threats and wildest allegations. This has usually been balanced, if at all, by a brief low-key response from the State Department spokesman, and by the infrequent appearance...