RNA – Hujjat al-Islam Mohammad-Hasan Rahimian, the custodian of Qom’s Jamkaran Mosque, referred to the 38th anniversary of the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran said, “On November 4th, 1979, a group of young people captured the American ‘Den of Spies’ and Imam Khomeyni considered this incident as a larger revolution than the first [Islamic] Revolution.”
The chairman of the Central Committee of the Popular Front of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps added, “The people must always look at their enemies with insight, vigilance and their eyes wide open and not give them peace, even for a moment, because if they leave them alone, they will not leave us alone.”
Referring to the distortion of the thought of Imam Khomeyni, the late founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, by some officials, he said, “Those who say that the Imam was not in favour of the slogan ‘Down with America,’ hasn’t paid attention to the Imam’s statements wherein the Imam has said, ‘We hope to hear the sound of ‘Death to America’ not only from the mosques but from the belfries of the churches.”
Hujjat al-Islam Rahimian continued, “After the capture of the Den of Spies, Imam explicitly stated that we must be a stubborn enemy of those file of cooperation with the United States came out of the Den of Spies.’”
He continued, “Imam Khomeyni said God awakened those who dreamed of a relationship with the United States and we must not forget that the Islamic Revolution, the Imposed War [Iran-Iraq War] and Lebanon’s Hezbollah were victorious through resistance.”
In the end, Hujjat al-Islam Rahimian referred to the victory of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Syria and Iraq and said, “The United States has admitted itself that more than eighty nations of the world united to drive Syria away from Resistance Axis but the Resistance Axis achieved victory and there have always been defeats for the ‘Great Satan.’ The Imam predicted to us that the next century would be the century of Islam and that Islam would destroy the superpowers.”
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian university students took over the American diplomatic mission, which they believed had turned into a centre of espionage aimed at overthrowing the then-nascent Islamic Republic.
Each year, Iranians rally outside the former US embassy building, also known as the “Den of Spies,” to mark the event.