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Avideh Motmaen-Far: Why Iran is burying Khamenei now

Iran is staging a six-day spectacle for a Supreme Leader you'll never see

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From Toronto, where a good part of Iran’s exiled conscience now lives, this week’s images out of Tehran are meant to break the West’s resolve against the regime. The Islamic Republic has been staging a six-day imperial funeral for Ali Khamenei — a procession from Tehran through Qom, Najaf, Karbala and Mashhad, with the state projecting 15 to 20 million mourners, ending with his burial on Thursday. The scale is the message. We are supposed to look at the crowd and conclude that the regime is eternal. Do not give the regime that satisfaction. This funeral is not a measure of the regime’s strength. It is a monument to the West’s failure of nerve — and to the deal that financed it.

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Starting with the facts the spectacle is designed to bury, Khamenei has been dead since Feb. 28, killed with several relatives in the joint U.S.–Israeli strike that opened the war. His body sat in cold storage for four months — not out of piety, but calculation, waiting for the safest, most useful week to convert a corpse into a demonstration of power. That week arrived courtesy of the ceasefire. You cannot parade 20 million people through five cities while the bombs are still falling. The truce is precisely what made the parade possible. And while U.S. President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire’s end Wednesday morning, putting the burial scheduled for the next day........

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