Every now and then, you hit a direct quote in a news story that makes you pause, scratch your head and say, “What?”
That’s what happened recently to a GetReligion reader who while looking at an Associated Press report about an interesting plot twist in the life of man who participated in one of the most important news events of the late 1970s.
Here is the headline that appeared atop the Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne, Ind.) version of this AP story: “Iranian student now regrets seizing embassy.”
Let’s look at the overture, reading down to the key quote:
TEHRAN, Iran — His revolutionary fervor diminished by the years that have also turned his dark brown hair white, one of the Iranian student leaders of the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover says he now regrets the seizure of the diplomatic compound and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed.
Speaking to The Associated Press ahead of today's 40th anniversary of the attack, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh acknowledged that the repercussions of the crisis still reverberate as tensions remain high between the U.S. and Iran over Tehran's collapsing nuclear deal with world powers.
Asgharzadeh cautioned others against following in his footsteps, despite the takeover becoming enshrined in hard-line mythology. He also disputed a revisionist history now being offered by supporters of Iran's Revolutionary Guard that they directed the attack, insisting all the blame rested with the Islamist students who let the crisis spin out of control.
“Like Jesus Christ, I bear all the sins on my shoulders,” Asgharzadeh said.
Yes, that’s apparently what he said.
As our reader commented in an email: “He mentions Jesus taking on the sins of the world on his shoulders, and he is doing likewise. Might he have become Christian? If so, does that have anything to do with his change of heart? It's an odd comment to make and just leave dangling.”
That is a distinct possibility. Then again, Muslims do revere Jesus of Nazareth as an important prophet, but not the Son of God — the Second Person in the Trinitarian view of God that Islam totally rejects (as stated in the famous inscriptions inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem).
So, did Asgharzadeh choose that image for his sense of responsibility for this event because he was being interviewed by a reporter from a major wire service that is based in the United States? He knew that image would resonate with readers in the West? Or was this a statement linked, as the GetReligion reader said, to a conversion to Christianity?
If we are dealing with that second scenario, isn’t that a rather significant fact to include in a news report about this man’s change of heart?
So what else does the story tell readers about this man? Here is how the story ends, with a few more lines of biographical information about Asgharzadeh:
Asgharzadeh denied that Iran's then-nascent Revolutionary Guard directed the U.S. Embassy takeover, although he said it was informed before the attack over fears that security forces would storm the compound and retake it. …
“In a very limited way, we informed one of the Guard's units and they accepted to protect the embassy from outside,” Asgharzadeh said. “The claim (by hard-liners) on the Guard's role lacks credit. I am the main narrator of the incident and I am still alive.”
In the years since, Asgharzadeh has become a reformist politician and served prison time for his views. He has argued that Iran should work toward improving ties with the U.S., a difficult task amid President Donald Trump's maximalist campaign against Tehran.
So that’s that.
That’s quite a God-shaped hole in the narrative of this man’s life, wouldn’t you say? A rather obvious religion ghost, as your GetReligionistas would say.