Reza Pahlavi believes Iran is ripe for a revolution.
As the eldest son of the last Shah of Iran, the 63-year-old Crown Prince is on a mission to drive the radical Islamic men who overthrew his father 45 years ago out of power and replace them with a secular democracy chosen by and for the Iranian people.
His Royal Highness says the Islamic regime is weaker than ever before and that the Iranian people are hungry for change.
“The fight for freedom and liberty is a cause that never ends until it’s done,” Pahlavi told CBN News.
Now, he’s warning the United States and Western powers to not be fooled by the election of Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian.
“We call this the circus of elections in Iran,” Pahlavi said.
Pahlavi is the regime’s most vocal and prominent critic. He calls Pezeshkian a “lackey” handpicked by a radical Muslim system bent on keeping Iranians in a constant state of repression and fear.
“In all these years, it really didn’t matter who was presented because all the shots are finally called by Khamenei, the supreme leader,” he explained.
During a wide-ranging interview with CBN News, the son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, said Iranians are clamoring for political change like never before.
“The regime’s own figures demonstrate that at least 73% of the population want another form of government,” Pahlavi said. “I imagine the numbers are much higher than that because if it was an actual open polling you would probably have that in the 90 percentile range.”
In 1979, as heir to the throne, Pahlavi was in the U.S. training to be a fighter pilot when radical Muslim leaders forced his father to relinquish the monarchy, sending the entire family into exile.
Pahlavi says the aftermath led to an Islamic-run regime that would devastate his ancestral homeland where today 60% of the people live below the poverty line.
“Forty-five years of clerical rule in the name of religion and the immediate element of persecution and the fact that our country has fallen behind in terms of being on the route towards progress, because Iran by now should have been the South Korea of the Middle East, instead it’s the North Korea of the region,” the Crown Prince told CBN News.
Under the mullah’s reign, Iran has become a leading state sponsor of terrorism and the root cause of instability in the Middle East and beyond.
“It finances Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, all in its proxy wars, and of course, its whole network of activists they have that are doing the bidding of the regime in the outside world, even in Western capitals, intimidating and threatening journalists, members of the Jewish community or what have you as an example,” Pahlavi said.
Forty-five years after the radical Muslim clerics took over the country, His Royal Highness says the mullahs of Tehran are weaker than ever before and that their legitimacy has been lost in the eyes of a majority of Iranians.
“When you lose your legitimacy, whether it’s religious legitimacy or political legitimacy, then you are simply holding on by sheer repression. When you have a regime that is completely delegitimized when you have people who no longer believe in the system, even if they did at some point and they want out, that makes this system vulnerable.”
Case in point: The 2022 nationwide protests that followed the murder of Mahsa Amini who was detained by religious police for allegedly not properly wearing her mandatory hijab.
Iranian security forces killed more than 500 protestors and imprisoned some 20,000 people.
Pahlavi says this clearly shows Iranians are ready to sacrifice for revolution.
“Nobody said that freedom comes for free, the price sometimes is extremely high but are you willing to say that just because it’s just too expensive that I’m not going to purchase it and put up with what otherwise would be annihilation, demise,” Pahlavi told CBN News. “We don’t have a choice in this. It’s not a matter of figuring out whether it’s worth it or not, we don’t have choice we have to do it. We must do it for survival, we have to do it for sanity, we have to do it for humanity, we have to do it for our own interests, no matter what it takes.”
With Iran’s proxy attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East, acceleration of its nuclear uranium enrichment program, and funding of Hezbollah and other terror groups, Pahlavi cannot understand why the Biden administration continues to keep billions of dollars flowing to the terror regime.
He says it’s time Western governments stop appeasing the mullahs of Tehran.
“What I have argued for years to foreign governments, particularly Western democracies, has been that your expectation of behavioral change from the get-go was a false expectation, because you’ve simply not recognized the DNA of this regime that needs to do all it does in order to survive. It’s not interested in the welfare of the Iranian people, it is simply aiming to export an ideology to dominate the whole world, starting from our own region all the way to the Western world.”
Pahlavi, who idolizes Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi for their pursuit of non-violent campaigns for political change, runs the National Council of Iran whose mission is to replace the current Islamic-led regime with a secular democracy.
He wants the world to focus on supporting the Iranian people rather than keep coddling the regime’s thugs.
“Even those who believe that maybe we could try and bring reform from within slowly but surely have given up on this idea. Reform is from yesteryear. Today we must go beyond this regime and are now on a path of convergence with those of us from the very beginning have been saying, look, we cannot have a religious dictatorship in the 21st Century, we must go towards a secular democracy,” Pahlavi noted. “So that’s why I believe a majority of Iranians find themselves in the same optic, in the same vision. We will be able to do this much better and faster and at lower cost if we have the tacit support of key, free nations around the world.”
Meanwhile, Pahlavi told CBN News that despite Iran’s continued violations against religious freedom, people there are turning to faith, especially Christianity, like never before.
“The discriminations started against religious minorities. The Jews were the first, followed by the Bahais. Lately it’s been mostly the Christians that are targeted,” Pahlavi told CBN News. “Iran has probably right now the fastest growing faith in Christianity than any other faith that the country has had. We have hundreds of underground churches.”
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Those who convert are paying a price. The U.S. Department of State’s latest report shows the regime’s restrictions on religion have reached their highest level since tracking began 17 years ago.
“Unfortunately, Christians are being persecuted. It is a crime to convert to Christianity punishable by death. Most people who are members of the church end up having 10-to-15-year sentences. Priests are being assassinated by the regime,” Pahlavi said. “When you have this happening, this is just one group of people, but imagine every sector of society that are facing that kind of approach.”
CBN News asked Pahlavi if he believed fighting for democracy in Iran is worth the price of the countless who’ve been killed at the hands of the regime and thousands imprisoned for challenging the regime.
“There were moments in time that I wonder if South Africans would have given up or people in the Eastern Bloc countries would have given up, or many people in Latin America fighting military juntas and dictatorships would have given up, or people in China would have given up, and even dissidents in the Soviet Union would have given up,” Pahlavi said. “I haven’t heard once a dissident anywhere on the planet say, ‘You know what? I give up.’ You can’t give up. It’s not an option. And I think Iranians are the reason why they haven’t given up. The reason why they go to the streets, the reason why they take the risk to be shot in the eye or continue to be murdered by the regime is because they know that the only way out is for us to succeed. And if they have to sacrifice themselves so that future generations will, you know, have a better life, so be it.”