“Joseph Stalin,” Charles de Gaulle famously observed, “didn’t walk away into the past, he dissolved into the future.” Stalin, the French leader was saying, was a harbinger of what was to come. The brutal system that the Soviet dictator helped build and perfect would outlive him.
While nowhere near as well-known or as powerful, the same could be said for Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, who died in Tehran on June 7, 2021at the age of 74. A Shi’ite cleric and acolyte of regime founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mohtashamipur died from complications relating to COVID-19. His legacy, however, will rest with his role in spreading a virus of a different form: Islamism.
Obituaries in Western news outlets noted that Mohtashamipur was a founder of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed, U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules Lebanon. But Mohtashamipur was more than a founding father of one of the world’s largest terrorist organizations.
Read the rest of CAMERA’s June 21, 2021 op-ed in The National Interest