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Iran: No Major Outpouring of Grief for “Butcher of Tehran” Raisi

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Five days of official mourning have been instituted to honor Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi who died in a helicopter crash on Monday, but Iran has not seen any mass outpouring of public grief for him.

A brutal hardline Islamist, Raisi was known as the “Butcher of Tehran” for the atrocities and oppression he ordered against his own people, not least dissidents and women.

Many mosques and squares have been filled with government officials and loyalists who gathered to commemorate Raisi, but most shops have remained open in an indication that grief is not widespread, Reuters reported.

After decades of repressive Islamic rule ushered in during the 1979 revolution, civilians have fresh memories of hundreds of Iranians being killed by the government during nationwide protests triggered by the 2022 death in custody of an Iranian woman arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly.

“A year after Raisi’s hardline government cracked down violently to end the biggest anti-establishment demonstrations since the 1979 revolution, opponents even posted furtive video online of people passing out sweets to celebrate his death,” Reuters reported.

In an OpEd for Newsweek, Sheila Nazarian, an Iranian-American surgeon, wrote: “As a woman born in Iran, I feel not just a sense of celebration at the death of this evil man, but of relief. It is a feeling I share with a great many of my countrymen, and—in particular—countrywomen. To understand why, you have to know that Ebrahim Raisi—though robed by his brutal regime with the dignity of ‘President’—was a mass murderer responsible for atrocities and oppression in Iran and across the region. This is why he is known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran.’”