I canceled my brief subsription to The Economist when it published its Israel Alone issue in March 2024. The wish was obviously father to the thought. I got the message. Screw you, I thought.
However, Saul Sadka has kept reading. He decries what he calls The Economist’s “fighting back the tears” obituary for Iran’s formerly supreme leader. Reading Sadka’s “key takeaways,” I wondered if this could be for real. Then I found a copy of the obituary pegged to the bottom of his post on X. This is the text of his takeaways:
The Economist, in its “fighting back the tears” obituary for Khamenei, salivates with true depravity over Trump’s future death in grisly, if ecstatic, terms: “…when Mr. Trump’s body was ashes, eaten by worms and ants.” It makes the Washington Post and its infamous “Austere Islamic Scholar” obituary for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi seem very quaint indeed.
But I read the whole thing so you don’t have to. The key takeaways:
1. The USA is the Great Satan—no scare quotes.
2. For readers who don’t know what “Israel” is, the Economist helpfully translates it in parentheses as “the little Satan.”
3. Khamenei, otherwise known as “God’s Dictator,” had “divine right on his side” and had “countless reasons to hate the West,” which is an America-led “phalanx of morally corrupt countries.”
4. Khamenei was a sainted and humble man, dragged to power against his will, selfless and “heroically flexible” and unassailable—a “humble cleric from Mashhad who inherited the earth.”
5. Honourable in life, but perfect in death: what could be sweeter than delicious martyrdom? What could be “more deserving of paradise-to-come than to drink the pure draught of a martyr’s end”?!
6. According to the Economist, “Freedom, human rights, dress codes for women” are “tiresome Western tropes.” Yes, really.
7. All his troubles were economic: he was tormented by the West and by foreign enemies. All the crimes he ordered—beatings, killings, and so on—were, naturally, merely “a response” to those Western crimes.
8. He “rules by divine authority,” and “his tongue could channel God.”
9. He was just a ”mild-mannered cleric” gazed benignly from billboards and was a great teacher of forgiveness.”
We have now surely reached the apogee of the decay of the legacy media in the West. Surely it can’t sink lower than this?
Well, yes it can! And will. But there is nevertheless something almost shocking about this obituary that purports take us inside the mind of the ayatollah. It presumes to channel Khameni’s thinking, as James Joyce did Molly Bloom’s in the last chapter of Ulysses.
This accounts for some of Sadka’s takeaways. It’s not the author speaking, it’s Khameni! Don’t you get it?
All in all, a performance worthy of a new chapter in Suicide of the West.
Quotable quote (from the obituary): “In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 America even supported Iraq, ruled by a tyrant, rather than Iran.”
The Economist, in its “fighting back the tears” obituary for Khamenei, salivates with true depravity over Trump’s future death in grisly, if ecstatic, terms: “…when Mr. Trump’s body was ashes, eaten by worms and ants.” It makes the Washington Post and its infamous “Austere… pic.twitter.com/w1gxyFez2L
— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) March 8, 2026
