Honorable Supreme Leader,
His Excellency Ayatollah Khamenei, may his auspices be glorified,
After greetings and respects,
Yesterday, the fifteenth of Khordad, which His Eminence, the Imam, declared as a day of public mourning, coincided with the first day of your leadership.
Yesterday, I intermittently watched television programs. In some programs, your twenty-seven years of leadership were depicted in an organized manner. Anyone who watched these programs and was influenced by them would immediately and without hesitation give you a score of twenty out of twenty in terms of leadership.
This is the broadcasting service where you appoint its head and outline its policies.
If students’ exam papers were given to the students themselves to grade, almost all of them would give themselves a score of twenty. Where in the world does such a thing happen?
The score a student gives themselves is not important and is not a basis for evaluation. What matters is what the professors of that subject, as impartial experts and judges, write beneath their exam papers.
If you inquired about your twenty-seven years of leadership from the people, and the people could respond without fear or apprehension, and if you broadcast the people’s responses, especially those from experts, and even critics and opponents, uncensored on television, your actual score would become clearer to an extent.
If a speaker, in a one-hour speech, praised you for fifty-nine minutes and in one minute criticized you, this broadcasting service that I know would not air the speech. Or, if they do, they would censor that one minute out.
In all these twenty-seven years you have been the Leader, show me where the broadcasting service, even for one minute, has aired criticism of your leadership.
If I were in your place, this year at the Imam’s shrine ceremony, I would say to the people:
“Oh people; I have governed you for twenty-seven years. After all, I am not a faultless Imam. If anyone has criticism of my leadership, let them freely express it in schools, universities, newspapers, and even on the broadcasting service, and know that they will face no threat.”
To the newspapers, I would say:
“From now on, if a newspaper directly and openly criticizes me, calls such and such action of mine a mistake, scrutinizes my past actions, and finds fault with my work, and deems such and such statement of mine erroneous, that newspaper will not be reprimanded, nor will its office be attacked.”
If someone writes an article critiquing the leadership, they will not be summoned or threatened by the Ministry of Intelligence or the Intelligence unit of the Revolutionary Guards.
No university professor or teacher will be dismissed for publicly criticizing the Leader, nor will they be framed or denied a livelihood.
From now on, the Friday prayer leaders do not need to continuously praise me. Rest assured that if they criticize my actions, they will not be dismissed from their positions.
Henceforth, any official in the country who mentions my name in their speeches without any suffix or prefix will not be perceived as having insulted me.
With regards,
Mohammad Mahdavifar
Deminer and diver of the Sacred Defense
16th of Khordad, 1395 [June 5, 2016]