The president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday, was famous for his massacres of Iranian citizens, so much so that he was known as “the Butcher of Tehran.”
Raisi was instrumental in the massacre of 5,000 political prisoners in 1988, and over 500 Iranian demonstrators in 2019. Between July and September 1988, Raisi and others “disappeared” and extra-judicially murdered thousands of political dissidents in 32 cities. The bodies were buried mostly in unmarked graves, the location of which the Islamic theocracy continues to keep a closely guarded secret.
Raisi boasted about his role on a death panel in 1988, when he ordered the summary execution of dissidents, calling it “one of the proud achievements” of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The presidency is largely a ceremonial role in the country, which is an Islamic theocracy ruled by an 85 year-old ayatollah, Ali Khamenei. When he died, Raisi was returning from a ceremony for the opening of two new dams, built in cooperation with Azerbaijan.
At the United Nations in New York, the delegates rose for a moment of silence to honor Raisi, in which the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. participated. In Washington, United States Senate chaplain Barry Black, who is a Seventh-day Adventist, prayed for the people of Iran “who mourn the death of their president”:
This is comparable to praying for the Germans who mourned the death of Hitler, or the Russians who mourned the death of Stalin, or the Chinese who mourned the death of Mao, etc., etc.
Most Iranians would be thrilled to be rid of their repressive Muslim theocracy, but they are learning—as have many others before them—that it is much easier to set up a tyrannical totalitarian state than it is to get rid of it. It is a lesson we have not had to learn in America, but will soon.