Iranian Top Student Confronts Khamenei in Public– Distraught Supreme Leader Forced to Leave Meeting Early (Video)
Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 6:00 AM
Top Iranian student Mahmoud Vahidnia confronted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei at a public meeting with students. The Supreme Leader was so distraught by the confrontation that he skipped prayers and left the meeting early. The event was being broadcast by Iranian state-run TV. That made the authorities stop airing the programme.
Rooz Online reported:
Mahmoud Vahidnia, a distinguished mathematics whiz from the Sharif Technical University, frankly criticized the supreme leader during his meeting with students, as state-run media outlets were unable to censor the remarks.
This international mathematics Olympiad winner blasted Khamenei in person in an unexpected move, focusing on “supreme leader’s performance” and the “lack of criticism against supreme leader.”
In addition to criticizing Khamenei personally and the office of the supreme leader, this student also criticized the state radio and television’s biased coverage of issues and the police’s brutal crackdown of people protesting against the election results.
Ayatollah Khamenei was forced to respond to the student’s criticism, but according to several eye-witness sources, the supreme leader was so distraught by the student’s remarks that he cancelled the usual prayer session and left the meeting early.
According to this video, Vahidnia disappeared after the confrontation.
UPDATE: Here’s the video in Farsi. The reaction by those attending the event is interesting.
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Published May 23, 2012 at 11:51 pm - 49 Comments
starboardhelm commented:
I am awestruck by his bravery. And I’m praying for his safety.
Joe Camel commented:
I bet he was not seen after the meeting..as in he won’t be seen again..Gotta love those “Democracies” in life.
rumcrook® commented:
this is a real example of “speaking truth to power”
a heroic and ultimately life threatening gesture of trying to be free.
as apposed to the absolutely orwellian farce of hearing a minion of the whitehouse, a person who is “the power” say they are speaking truth to power by fighting fox news. *spit*
Joan of Argghh! commented:
Wow. No comrades in arms, no flak jacket, no armored support, not even a gun for defense. It’s a singular sort of bravery and love of the Truth.
Pray God spare his life in the lion’s den. . .
Cargosquid commented:
How does that man walk……balls of steel.
Pat the First commented:
I hope that he “disappeared” is more like he has fled Iran. I hope he re-surfaces somewhere in the free world. I hope this is not the last we hear from him.
Cargosquid commented:
Oops. sorry for the previous, thinking out loud…
hope it didn’t break the rules….
njoriole commented:
Hey Valerie Jarret: THIS is what “Speaking truth to power” really looks like.
AuntWie commented:
Now THAT is courage. I hope he was spirited off by his friends and not by his government.
I, too, am praying for him.
Why is our government not supporting these people?
Kevin commented:
Unbelievable courage, I’m sure he knew he could have possibly been signing his own death warrant.
No matter which way this goes, this brilliant young man should be held up as an example to the likes of Code Pink and Annette Benning.
I too, pray for his safety.
Paul B. commented:
I am in awe of these people. Please we need to pray for his protection, and that the Iranians rise up en masse on his behalf.
I agree, this is real truth-to-power, not the fake Jarrett kind.
Captain Ned commented:
The Iranian version of the Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” of 1989. I hope he pre-planned his exit from Iran.
Dr Carlo Lombardi commented:
njorioleNo Gravatar
November 2nd, 2009 | 7:51 pm | #9
Hey Valerie Jarret: THIS is what “Speaking truth to power” really looks like.
+100
Michael commented:
This young Iranian is my hero. To confront his countrymen’s main oppressor knowing full well it may cost him his life at worse or torture at best.
May God look over this great person.
To me this is what an American is. America is not a place, it’s an ideal. And this paladin represents bravery in the face of statist criminality.
ar05075 commented:
Brave kid.!!! May he rest in peace.
Derek commented:
So, ya think Obama would say something to support this kid and possibly help save his life? Nah……………..
Marianne7 commented:
Wow… That man is one of a kind. If Iran keeps killing off their best, they will be left with only the beasts after awhile. And the beasts are as likely to turn on their leaders and each other as to be directed.
jenny commented:
May God bless this young man and his courage.
gus commented:
Ah yes President “Present”, that “Robust debate” in Iran. It’s a killer.
Jo commented:
“Our interests are the same no matter what country we’re talking to.” –Obama adviser Rhodes. “”Our interests are the same with our allies and our adversaries,”" –Obama adviser Rhodes.
Jo: But Bozo Some Countries what to kill us all.
BOZO: That is in our interest.
bg commented:
++
prayers going out for Mahmoud Vahidnia & those he represents..
we need a few students like that here in the US (albeit they won’t get a death threat, not yet anyways), what can they do to them aside from the usual “F” threat..
==
Stephen commented:
Knowing what dictators have done to such people throughout history, he most likely will be tortured until he apologizes, saying he was wrong, praising the ‘dear leader’ and then made ‘disappeared’ by government troops. A lot of work I know, but they were unable to censor the spread of this–had they achieved that, he would just be made ‘disappeared.’ And the US will do nothing to comment this man’s bravery (due to not wanting to ‘upset Iran’) and when most likely he is ‘disappeared’ they will issue ‘strong words’ if that.
We should start bombing Iran’s military and nuclear facilities 6 years ago. Islamists, like all other totalitarians know no language other than force. Such force needs to be met with force and their ‘divine’ army and leaders (divinely satanic) need to be pounded into the dirt by several very large bombs and cruise missiles. They only respect what they fear, and it is time fear is brought to them.
The past 6 years of dealing with this satanic government has bore no fruits, no more than the appeasement with Hitler did. Their ‘leader’ still denies that Hitler killed 5,500,000 Jews and wishes to do that himself. Perhaps he denies the holocaust because he is envious that Hitler struck in that manner first, who knows, I for one do not wish to try and think like someone who wishes to exterminate entire populations.
Some may consider such suggestions as war-mongering, but how many lives would have been saved had the West continued to fight the Russian Civil War and defeat the Reds before they could rule, 40,000,000 (Stalin), 45,000,000 (Lenin+Stalin)? What of intervening to stop Hitler, 20,000,000 lives saved there. What of had the US committed itself to aiding the nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, 75,000,000 civilians would not have died in terror. Inaction leads to more deaths than directly confronting threats.
JenBee commented:
He notes the “lack of criticism against supreme leader” … he could very well be talking about the US and its state run media.
FU*K OBAMA commented:
Now that is the type of supression of the opposition that Der Furher Obama wants!
Hope commented:
Wow! In Awe of this young man’s bravery! Praying for his well being!
Hope commented:
These people are still protesting regularly. Though they have disappeared from the news, they have never stopped. I have been watching them daily since the election. Brave, Brave Population.
http://raymankojast.blogspot.com/
stacy commented:
I am 100% sure that Khamenei’s distraught-beyond-measure behavior is EXACTLY what Obama would do if this were done to him, and by all means, it should be. However, Obama tries to insure that this does not happen to him by stacking the audience and hiring people to read his questions.
I applaud the bravery of this student. If only American students were so astute and cared enough to stand against the tyranny they are facing.
Stan commented:
Reminds me of The White Rose in Nazi Germany. That took courage on conviction…something we can emulate here with virtually no threat to our livelihood.
CathyB commented:
A timely reminder to those states with an election vote today—GET OUT AND VOTE!!!
This courageous young man risked his life to simply criticize his government.
We need to get down to the polls and do our part to peacefully remove the hypocrites presently in power.
VOTE!!!!!
TimothyJ commented:
One thing is sure. He will not find sanctuary in Obie’s America. If he shows up here, seeking asylum, Obie will have him turned over to the Iranian’s as fast as possible. After all, he’s never met a dictator that he didn’t love and want to kiss….. You can figure it out.
bg commented:
++
TimothyJ @ 10:56 am #32
re: [After all, he’s never met a dictator that he didn’t
love and want to kiss….. You can figure it out.]
that reminds me, where’s the left hand of god Jimmah??
==
Dick Turpin commented:
Hope he as a safe house to lay low in like…..FOREVER.
Marianne7 commented:
I think the audience reaction was by and large mourning the young man’s imminent demise…
bg commented:
++
btw, anyone keeping track of how many times K has reportedly
been either in a coma, on his death bed, or dead to date??
one thing for sure, it makes me wonder
how many K “clones” are up & about..
ps: via Anti-Mullah
OBA-HUSSEIN-KHOMEINI – MOSLEM WITH COMMUNIST TRAINING LIKE SO MANY MULLAHS
[In fact the two "isms" Communism and Mohammadenism (as the Islamists were named for manu centuries) closely resemble each other in methods of rule by force by an oligarchy of a few (clerics or Kommisars) and suppression of human rights and all freedoms, leaving only obedience, specially for women that would lead to democracy.
[..]
Oba-Hussein, the American Khomeini, though still short of the Ayatollah Khomeini blood baths, is implementing the worst of both Islam and Communism inside the USA – BUT IN SMALLER INCREMENTS. We are just being choked in a slower fashion rather than being annihilated in a bloody putsch.]
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” B Hussein O
oh yeah, sort of found the lost Jimmah..
[Being an ally of the U.S. in the Cold War, Iran was a target for Soviet subversion and espionage. Like the U.S. in today's war on terror, Iran arrested and incarcerated many who threatened its sovereignty and existence, mainly Soviet agents and their collaborators.
This did not sit well with the former peanut farmer, who, on taking office, declared that advancing "human rights" was among his highest priorities. The Shah was one of his first targets.
As he's done with our terror-war detainees in Guantanamo, Carter accused the Shah of torturing some 3,000 "political" prisoners.
(Alan Note: Actual figure from Amnesty International was closer to 2,400 - mostly Tudeh Communists and Soviet supporting Marxist-Islamists).
He chastised the Shah for his human rights record and engineered the withdrawal of American support.
The irony here is that when Khomeini, a former Muslim exile in Paris, overthrew the Shah in February 1979, many of these 3,000 were executed by the ayatollah's firing squads along with 20,000 pro-Western Iranians.]
==
bg commented:
++
OT..
on another front, uh, according to O et al, the main front in the Global War on Terror (hope i’m not going to be J plummered for calling it that)..
Hamid Karzai isn’t the biggest problem in Afghanistan.
[General Stanley McChrystal, the Afghan theater commander, has done his duty and requested the 40,000 troops that he says are a minimum to implement the strategy that Mr. Obama himself announced in March. A counterinsurgency that has a primary goal of securing the Afghan people can prevail and is already doing so in parts of the country where it is being tried. We also know from Iraq that such a strategy can yield results relatively quickly if it is done with enough troops.
The Joe Biden alternative of attacking al Qaeda from afar without local intelligence gathered from the population isn't likely to work. For strategic judgment, we'll take Generals McChrystal and David Petraeus over Mr. Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel every time.
The main problem now isn't Afghanistan's President. It is that no one in Washington or around the world is sure whether America's President is committed to his own strategy—or even if he'll stick with that strategy if he reaffirms it.
[..]
Most important, the American people will quickly lose faith in a war that they conclude their Commander in Chief is ambivalent about fighting. Reports of puzzled commanders and troops in the field are already multiplying as they wonder why they’re risking death by IED if Mr. Obama isn’t sure about the mission.
For purely domestic political reasons, Mr. Obama may be tempted to split the difference between General McChrystal’s request and the 68,000 troops now on the ground. This could well be the worst option: A reaffirmation of the same goals in Afghanistan without the troops and resources that the military brass believes are needed to succeed.]
Barack Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan
(i advise watching & listening to it before it’s
gobbled up by OGorenets black hole machine)
==
bg commented:
++
re: bg @ 12:55 pm #37
correct: OBA-HUSSEIN-KHOMEINI – link..
==
redc1c4 commented:
#10:”Why is our government not supporting these people?”
because Ear Leader, if he thought he could get away with it, would do the same sort of things here to stay in power.
unfortunately for him, unlike the Iranians, we are armed.
bg commented:
++
redc1c4 @ 5:22 pm #40
re: [unfortunately for him, unlike
the Iranians, we are armed.]
never doubt O & his ilk have been earnestly working on that for years..
[Passage of either of two bills, HR 45 (also known as Blair-Holt Firearm Licensing and Record Sale Act of 2009) and S 1317, would be a devastating blow to Second Amendment rights.]
==
homylafayette commented:
If you’d like more information on this event, please check out this article on my blog:
http://homylafayette.blogspot.com/2009/10/student-criticizes-khamenei-at-official.html
Best
Kukulkan commented:
Hi, I’m a rock stupid conservative without a brain in my head! How can I spin this into a failure of Obama? Please tell me how I can use this further the preposterous notion that he is a nazi! Please Glenn Beck!
… idiots.
Koen commented:
Iran, a country full of modern, young bright people… run by stiff old bearded men that overestimate themselves.
Mahdi Al-Dajjal commented:
Most certainly, this man won’t ever be seen again. Odds are he’s already been gang-raped by the regime’s henchmen (after performing the islamic ritual washing), and is now dead.
bg commented:
++
homylafayette @ 5:52 pm #42
insightful, thank you for sharing..
==
Marcus Reid commented:
I also hope that he is not being tortured. Is there any way that people can do something to help? Praying accomplishes nothing except to assuage the guilt of the person praying for their inaction.
JT commented:
Koen,
A lot of us see the USA as being exactly the same. The younger generations are in the process of permanently overpowering the older, conservative generation that has been fighting to keep our country from advancing while the rest of the world blows by us in nearly every aspect of life. I believe we still win at obesity and handgun deaths though.
Sigh commented:
A very brave fellow for sacrificing his life (whether he lives or dies, his life will be different) in a once in a lifetime moment to further the cause of his community. I hope Amnesty International can become involved and help him.
in Response to Stephen: Hindsight is always 20/20 and people are very poor at predicting the future.
In response to JenBee: the media in the US is owned by a small number of conservative rich people and not the government. The media reports what the owners want it to report. Rich people buy media companies, so they can control the discussion of their behavior. If you owned a company, would you have it do anything you did not approve of first? The media owners are conservative and so the press in the US is far more conservative than liberal in editorial slant. It is pure economics.
bg commented:
++
JT @10:00 pm #48
dis-arm AQ et al, de-nuke Iran, Pakistan, India Russia etc.. abolish money and i’ll gladly join you in building a utopian matrix (i more or less had the same dream until 9/11 awakened me to reality)..
Is It Right to Fight?
[One other point, if everyone was a pacifist except the evil and lawbreakers of the world, then the world would be run by evil dictators or our society would be anarchy.
Pacifism in its fullest sense is untenable in the sinful world in which we live.
[snip]
The subject “Is it right to fight?” is a difficult issue because it makes us face the awful issues of a suppressive dictatorship, evil aggression, killing and death on the one hand and the “necessary evil” of war to stop it. Could this be the reason that General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg said, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.” The just war position, in the writer’s opinion, fits best with the Scriptural evidence.
Remember, it is possible to love your enemies and use force against him. The principle that love is embraced in laws of justice helps us see that loving one’s enemy is to make sure that justice prevails. In doing so, the Christian is also demonstrating “love for the ones his enemy has hurt.”]
“On Moral Equivalency and Cold War History”
Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 10 (1996)
[Where does that leave us, though, with the new evidence we have about the victims of Stalin and Mao Zedong? One recent but reliable estimate suggests that Stalin's domestic victims alone - when one totals not only the figures for the purges but also for the collectivization of agriculture and the famine that resulted from it - numbered about twenty million dead. This does not count the additional acknowledged twenty-seven million Soviet citizens who died as a result of World War II. But this is not the worst of it. Estimates of those who died in one single episode - the Chinese famine produced by Mao's ill-conceived Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961 - now come to some thirty million, thereby qualifying the Chairman (whose image was once a popular adornment for t-shirts and dormitory wall posters in the West) as perhaps the greatest mass murderer of all time.
[snip]
Why didn’t the United States exploit its advantage to keep the Soviet Union from developing its own bomb? Or to avoid near-defeat in Korea? These are complicated questions, but one of the answers that comes up, when one looks at what American officials said to each other, is the conviction that a democracy could only use such a weapon as a last resort, and in self-defense.
But that in turn raises another interesting question of comparative morality: would an authoritarian system – one based on an ideology that explicitly justified any means necessary to achieve its ends, one that employed terror as a method of government, and one as casual about the loss of human life as were Stalin’s and Mao’s – have shown similar restraint had it got the bomb first?
[snip]
We need to be careful about the methodological metaphors we keep in our minds. Too much of Cold War history was written as if its major contenders were indeed featureless billiard balls, whose internal composition and character didn’t much matter. In retrospect, apples and oranges might have been the better metaphor: at least it would have allowed for irregularity, asymmetry, and the possibility of internal rot.]
same holds true today more than ever..
Death by Government
[How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.
Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.
But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.
What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family.]
more @ link..
what the fascist left have been aiming for is to “equate” good with evil.. that’s the only way they can appease their conscience in the face of the harsh reality they are trying to escape from because it does not fit in with their ideological utopian matrix.. if there is no good vs evil, then all is good even if [the] all is evil.. – bg
==
Dida commented:
answer to message #17
Obama can not help this guy because Iran will use it against that young brave guy , he would become the facto a student spy for america. We can not interfer or help without the US being accused of fomenting to destroy their islamic country. They have to free themselves by themselves. Go back and open your history books , and you will understand.