Word: reza
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From its earliest beginnings, the U.S. has been a haven for refugees. But never has the country paid a higher price for this tradition than it has for allowing in the deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi for treatment of his gallstones and cancer. For nearly a month, 50 Americans have been held hostage in Tehran under threat of execution by the revolutionary regime of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who demands the Shah's return...
Today Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is a man of 60, battling cancer, unwelcome in most countries of the world, and bearing a price on his head (an all-expenses-paid pilgrimage to Mecca, offered by the revolutionaries who overthrew him to anyone who succeeds in killing him). Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and his aides are filling the air with tirades against the Shah as a "U.S. puppet," a Hitlerian "criminal" who tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, a thief who looted Iran of untold billions. At the other extreme, the Shah's defenders cite the praises heaped...
Such imperial hauteur contrasted powerfully with the Shah's beginnings. Though he took great pains to present his reign as a continuation and fulfillment of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, his dynasty had not even been founded when he was born on Oct. 26, 1919. His father, Reza Khan, was a soldier's son who did not learn to read and write until he was an adult. Reza Khan started as a noncommissioned officer in the Persian army, rose to colonel, and in 1921 led a military revolt that finally ousted the last Shah of the Qajar...
...said he went to a lecture Chomsky was sponsoring for the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran. They had an Iranian poet to read his poetry--Reza Berahini... and a mob of Iranian students delayed the lecture for hours. There was a bomb threat. The Americans were scared. The Iranians said Berahini was a CIA agent. Yet he was an anti-Shah poet--he spent years in jail. So finally, Chomsky let one of the students speak at the podium, and the student waxes hot-faced and apologizes to the crowd for the disturbance. He says...
...States and Iran," Khomeini declared. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidels." He repeatedly threatened that the 49 American hostages held in the captured U.S. embassy in Tehran would be tried as spies, and possibly executed, if the U.S. does not send back the deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from the hospital in New York City...