Friends Don’t Let Friends Destroy Themselves

In September 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, people gathered by the thousands across the country of Iran in spontaneous demonstrations and candlelight vigils to show support for America in its hour of grief. At one football match in Tehran, sixty thousand football fans held a minute of silence in sympathy for the 9/11 victims.

Were these demonstrations a form of protest against the country’s rabidly anti-American leadership? No. The leadership shared the sentiments of the masses. In his first public remarks following the attacks, Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, “Islam condemns the massacre of defenseless people, whether Muslim or Christian or others, anywhere and by any means.” Iran’s president, chimed in, condemning the attacks and professing “deep regret and sympathy for the victims.”

The sympathy of iran’s people and leadership was all the more remarkable given Iran’s historical relationship with the United States, which overthrew its democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, backed the hideous torture regime of the Shah for the next 25 years, armed and aided Iraq in the bloody 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran throughout the 1990s. Yet this event, 9/11, pierced the shrouds of enmity to reveal the sympathetic connection that links all human beings to one another, even and especially those who call each other “enemy.”