Rooz Online | November 13, 2010
by Nima Farahabadi
Khamenei
For the first time ever, one of the better known websites of the principlists (ideologues who claim to follow ayatollah Khomeini’s legacy) revealed “secret contingency provisions” of the leader of the Islamic republic for the “administration of the revolution and the country.”
In a story posted on Jahan news site belonging to Alireza Zakani, this principlist Majlis member from Tehran and the secretary general of the Jamiate Rahpooyane Engelabe Eslami (the Association for the Followers of the Islamic Revolution) writes that ayatollah Khamenei has drawn up these measures in “the best possible manner”. According to Jahan, the piece was published in response to the “misuse of the remarks of the esteemed supreme leader by counter-revolutionary forces and their distortion in the seditionist media.” Seditionists is the label used by the regime when talking about opposition leaders and forces such as the green movement and dissidents.
The Controversial Interview
The article in Jahan site is a direct response to the interview that cleric Eslamian, a member of the teacher’s association of the Qom Theological Seminary gave to Fars news agency in which he described for the first time some details regarding the meeting that members of the teacher’s association in Qom had with the leader of the Islamic republic while the latter was visiting Qom two weeks ago.
In that interview, Eslamian says that during the teachers-Khamenei meeting as the discussion between the leader and members of the association turned to the administration, association members raised certain issues related to the government to which ayatollah Khamenei had responded by saying, “I have supported all administrations but this administration is different from the earlier ones and the principal difference is that it is not striving to create a parallel administration.”
Eslamian quotes ayatollah Khamenei to have also said, “Today, when the president or another senior government official goes abroad, I have no concerns, whereas before I was concerned about what they wanted to say there.” He also said that Khamenei had presented some examples of improper behavior from the past and gave this example: ‘At one time they brought in a piece of paper in connection with relations with a European country and raised some issues which were not respectable and I stood against them and in another similar incident made it clear that if they proceeded with the issue, I would announce my opposition to it.’”