Last week the Islamist theocrats who rule Iran buried one of their own, President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash week before last. In the manner of dictatorships, the Iranian authorities promoted massive displays of grief, with crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Some, of course, may have been genuinely mournful, while one suspects that the vast majority attended because they knew that the secret police were counting heads. It’s ever so in dictatorships.  The morally-compromised International Criminal Court indicts Israel for its efforts to bring Hamas to justice, and it receives the applause of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. One suspects that more than a few, however quietly, attended in that spirit of going to a funeral to make sure that the deceased is really dead. Representatives of 68 nations attended, some from the usual rogues gallery of tyrants, some from those countries the mullahs have so assiduously cultivated — one might say “bribed” — and some from countries that should have had the grace and good sense to avoid rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ismail Haniyeh, widely regarded as the overall leader of Hamas, someone that even our own State Department, notably squeamish about the applying the term, has designated as a terrorist. The Taliban were there as well, and all manner of bad actors. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: What the Red Ball Express Teaches Us About Ukraine) Unsurprisingly, loud chants of “death to America” rose up from the throngs of mourners, along with acclaim for the October 7 Hamas massacres of innocent Israeli civilians. With Iran’s Revolutionary Guards orchestrating the proceedings, the cheerleaders for rape and murder were out in full force. Now the cheers have faded, and, if we are to believe the Iran experts, it’s unlikely that Raisi’s passing will mean much with respect to the power structure within Iran or in terms of Iran’s relations with the world. Raisi’s death removed one obvious candidate to succeed the aging and increasingly frail Ayatollah Khamenei, but there’s nothing to indicate anything resembling a real shakeup in Iranian internal affairs. The Revolutionary Guards Council’s stranglehold on Iranian domestic politics and foreign policy will likely remain, as will Iran’s weird fusion of Stalinist repression and Shiite fundamentalism. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis will still be Teheran’s puppets, deployed against us at the Mullah’s bidding. Israel will continue to be the “little Satan,” we will be the “great Satan” and the thoughts of some kind of grand rapprochement with Iran, a revival, for example, of the once-touted nuclear deal, will remain nothing more than a fever dream of the Obama holdovers running the Biden administration’s foreign policy. But before we close the books on Raisi, we might do well to reflect upon the meaning of his life and ponder some of the overseas reactions to his death, both in other countries and within the ranks of our own so-called “progressive” elites. Arguably, his death offers a kind of Rorschach test, an inkblot through which a certain prominent strain of politico/moral values might stand revealed. It’s rare, after all, to experience a moment when we’re invited so forcefully to reflect upon the historical significance of a genuinely monstrous human being. Raisi’s sobriquet, the “Butcher of Teheran” was eminently deserved. A product of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, the same revolution that “held America hostage” for 444 days. He was one of those young men who rejoiced in the deaths of American special operators in a rescue attempt gone terribly wrong, one of the earliest of the “hate America” crowd. But even more, his hatred encompassed the secular and open-spirited Iran that had emerged in the 60s and 70s, an Iran ready to move on from the Shah’s autocracy, but not in the direction of the religious fanatics.  Raisi, however, and the thousands of religious radicals like him, had other plans for the country. From the very beginning he embraced and exemplified the violent passions of the revolution. He and his comrades, in a manner akin to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, formed a hard core vanguard, dedicated to taking control of the revolution and bending it to the purposes of the Ayatollah. Raisi soon became a leading light of the newly-created “judicial” system, rising rapidly through the ranks, making a name for himself as the most radical enforcer of the new Shiite dictatorship. To quote Amnesty International, over the past 44 years Raisi was “directly involved in or oversaw the enforced disappearance and extrajudicial executions of thousands of political dissidents.” He also oversaw the “torture of thousands of protestors and violent persecution of women and girls defying compulsory veiling, among other serious human rights violations.” He was a member of the “death commission” that in 1988 was responsible for the murder of thousands of political prisoners. As recently as 2018, he publicly defended these massacres as “one of the proud achievements of the Islamic Republic.”  In the same article, Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa offered the following blunt assessment. Raisi should have been “criminally investigated” for “crimes against humanity … while he was alive,” and that his death “should not rob his victims and their families of their right to truth and to see all others complicit in his crimes held to account.” Even in a world pockmarked with horror, one would look very hard to find someone as evil — as purely evil — as Raisi. One might wish, with Ms. Eltahawy, that Raisi’s death would not prevent an accounting with his crimes, but the world’s reaction to his death offers little reason for comfort. We might start with Iran’s major allies, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Kim’s North Korea. I’ll leave the proofs of renewed “Axis of Evil” for a dedicated analysis later, but it’s instructive that Putin, Xi, and Kim all singled out Raisi for praise. Putin characterized Raisi as a “man of his word” and “always good to work with” while expressing  his sympathy to Iran. China’s Xi noted that Raisi’s death meant that “the Chinese people have lost a good friend.” North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, described Raisi’s death as “a great loss.”  But it didn’t stop there. The U.S. State Department issued a press release expressing “official condolences” for the death of Raisi and the others killed in the helicopter crash (a statement, fortunately, condemned by Republicans in the House of Representatives). At the United Nations, Security Council representatives, including U.S. Deputy Ambassador, Robert Wood, stood in respect in a “moment of silence,” a move condemned by Israel’s U.N. Ambassador, Gilad Erdan. Erdan scathingly observed that the council had “bowed its head for a man responsible for massacring and murdering thousands in Iran, in Israel, and around the globe. What next? Will the Council dedicate a moment of silence to commemorate Hitler?”  We might do well to take Ambassador Erdan’s question and ask it of those among us who’ve spent the months since October 7 praising Hamas. After all, and at every level, from the steps of Congress to our college campuses, what we’ve witnessed has been nothing less than an outpouring of support for moral monstrosity not seen since the days of Hitler. And Ebrahim Raisi was just such a moral monster, and the regime he served so fanatically lives to perpetuate such monstrosity at home and to expand it across the world. If our campus protestors and their enablers retained a shred of moral decency, Raisi’s death and, even more, his life, might have served as the occasion for stepping back from their fatuous indulgences in hatred. They might have looked in the mirror and seen in themselves something very like the young Raisi of 1980, aflame with hatred, burning to impose his vision on others, regardless of their hopes and dreams. It might have been an occasion to demonstrate their solidarity with the women of Iran, who truly are the victims of unremitting religious repression.  But no, no such thing has occurred, because these people lack the moral compass necessary to understand what real repression looks like. Instead, they pretend that campus cops are the IDF. Palestinian cosplay as ridiculous as the “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes of a few short years ago. The morally-compromised International Criminal Court indicts Israel for its efforts to bring Hamas to justice, and it receives the applause of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, cheered on at a conference sponsored by groups linked to Hamas. Would that she and others like her might be given pause by the example of Raisi’s life, by the necessity of an accounting for the horrors properly laid at his tomb. But we can hardly expect those who identify with murderers and rapists to understand the moral deficiencies exemplified in Raisi’s life. (READ MORE: The Hero Who Saved a Cathedral) I’m not a fan of demonstrations. In a better world, college students would go to class, go to the library, work hard to understand, honestly, the world around them, and equip themselves to contribute positively through the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired. In a better world, they would learn at the feet of professors dedicated to honest and open inquiry, not narrow-minded ideologues, themselves uncomfortably akin in spirit to men such as Raisi. It’s scarcely accidental that no less a figure than the Ayatollah Khamenei himself has now praised both these students and the leftist professors who’ve nurtured and encouraged them. Nor is it accidental that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has now chosen to blame the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas on the Abraham Accords, the most notable Middle East peace initiative in decades. In a better world, voters would reject the likes of AOC, Tlaib, and Omar and all those who surf the waves of hatred. In a better world, our U.N. Security Council representative would have kept his butt firmly planted in his seat, rather than honoring the “Butcher of Teheran.”  I long instead for a day when our leaders would stand up once more for America, for the good people of this country, the ordinary citizens of this and all the preceding generations who’ve worked, who’ve built, who’ve farmed, who’ve raised families, all whose diligence has given us a country still envied around the world. Americans have just observed Memorial Day, reminded of all those who gave their lives so that we could live in freedom and enjoy the pursuit of happiness that is our birthright as Americans. Perhaps our leaders might stand up for them. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.  The post The Death of a Theocrat and Our Morally Obtuse Progressives appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.