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No. Khamenei knelt. He knelt constantly. He just chose his subjects carefully. He knelt to the logic of theocratic survival, which meant hanging teenagers from cranes for the crime of homosexuality. He knelt to the Revolutionary Guard’s economic racket, allowing them to hollow out the Iranian economy until the rial became wallpaper. He knelt to the principle that a woman’s hair is a national security threat, and when Mahsa Amini died in custody for showing hers, he knelt again, this time to the impulse that says the way to answer grief is with birdshot and batons. During the 2022 uprising, his forces blinded protesters by firing metal pellets into crowds. During the 2025 protests, thousands died while he blamed “external enemies” from behind concrete walls. This is the man who “stood on his own two feet.” The irony Cenk misses, because it would require reading a book, is that this is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. Every tyrant who brutalizes his own people claims the external enemy makes it necessary. Stalin had his capitalist encirclement. Mao had his imperialists. Saddam had Iran, then America, then whoever was convenient. The strongman always “stands tall” against the foreign threat. It’s the domestic population that gets forced to its knees. Khamenei didn’t refuse to bow to Israel out of courage. He needed Israel. The entire architecture of the Islamic Republic required an external Satan to justify internal repression. Every disappeared student, every tortured journalist, every woman beaten for insufficient veiling was, in the regime’s grammar, a soldier in the Zionist conspiracy. Remove Israel from Khamenei’s vocabulary and what remains is a frail cleric with no mandate, ruling a country where the median age is 32 and the majority of the population was born after the revolution and never consented to its terms. What Cenk is actually doing here, whether he knows it or not, is reproducing the regime’s own propaganda framework. The Islamic Republic spent forty-seven years telling its people that their suffering was noble because it served resistance. That poverty was dignity. That isolation was sovereignty. That the boot on your neck was actually holding you upright. Cenk has just restated this in English for an American audience, which is ventriloquism. Here is what courage actually looked like in Iran: it looked like Nika Shakarami, sixteen years old, burning her headscarf in the street before security forces killed her and tried to steal her body. It looked like the women who danced bareheaded on rooftops in Tehran while snipers were deployed below. It looked like the workers who went on strike knowing their families would pay for it. Those people stood on their own two feet. They stood against Khamenei. And tonight, while Cenk types out his eulogy, Iranians are in the streets of Tehran lighting fireworks. They are not mourning a man who stood tall. They are celebrating the fall of the man who made them crawl. @RobertMSterling

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