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Newsweek reports that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei will be the last Supreme Leader of the country, ever. Khamenei is only the second Supreme Leader the country has ever had, the first being Khomeini. His successor has proven to be less successful at being the most powerful voice in the country according to the clerical leadership.

From Newsweek:

Khamenei’s response to the massive election demonstrations this past summer reaffirmed a longstanding but secretive belief among a majority of Iran’s religious teachers and scholars: supreme clerical rule, no matter who is at the helm, can lead only to despotism and should be abolished. There can be no absolute power because, as Khamenei showed, men are fallible. It’s well enough understood outside Iran that those clerics have found common cause with the street demonstrators; what the rest of the world hasn’t realized yet is that they also want Khamenei gone.

The Supreme Leader will hold the position until he dies at which point the decision to eliminate the title could be made. Whether or not the standing theocratic order will be around that long is an entirely different question. The street protests continue sporadically and Neda Agha Soltan continues to be a powerful global symbol of the Iranian regime’s brutality (as we saw on the blog recently: Neda’s boyfriend speaks after escaping Iran).

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From mild-mannered mathlete to national opposition hero – it’s been a crazy couple of weeks for Iranian math student Mahmoud Vahidnia.

At a meeting between students and the Ayatollah Khamenei, Vahidnia raised his had to ask a question and then spent twenty minutes criticizing the country’s Supreme Leader to his face.

“I don’t know why in this country it’s not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you,” said the student, wearing a long-sleeved blue polo shirt and appearing calm.

“In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader,” he said, referring to the clerical body that chooses the country’s supreme leader.

Khamenei countered, “We welcome criticism. We never said not to criticize us. … There’s plenty of criticism that I receive,” according to accounts in state media and on opposition Web sites.

Contrary to the stories of the thousands of protesters and critics of the country’s election results – Mahmoud Vahidnia has faced no repercussions. In fact the incident was originally reported by the Supreme Leader’s office – touting the country’s tolerance for healthy debate. Initially many questioned whether the incident was staged for such a purpose – though opposition leaders are now saying the incident was the real deal.

Here’s some video (albeit in Persian) of the meeting with a little bit of Vahidnia at the podium.

(h/t themajlis.org)

Posted to Current News by elsonwvu.

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