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Or sign-in if you have an account.Prayers were held Sunday over the casket of Iran's late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the second day of funeral ceremonies that have drawn huge crowds to pay their final respects in Tehran. Photo by - /KHAMENEI.IR/AFP via Getty ImagesFrom Toronto, where a good part of Iran’s exiled conscience now lives, this week’s images out of Tehran are meant to break the West’s resolve against the regime. The Islamic Republic has been staging a six-day imperial funeral for Ali Khamenei — a procession from Tehran through Qom, Najaf, Karbala and Mashhad, with the state projecting 15 to 20 million mourners, ending with his burial on Thursday. The scale is the message. We are supposed to look at the crowd and conclude that the regime is eternal. Do not give the regime that satisfaction. This funeral is not a measure of the regime’s strength. It is a monument to the West’s failure of nerve — and to the deal that financed it.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorStarting with the facts the spectacle is designed to bury, Khamenei has been dead since Feb. 28, killed with several relatives in the joint U.S.–Israeli strike that opened the war. His body sat in cold storage for four months — not out of piety, but calculation, waiting for the safest, most useful week to convert a corpse into a demonstration of power. That week arrived courtesy of the ceasefire. You cannot parade 20 million people through five cities while the bombs are still falling. The truce is precisely what made the parade possible. And while U.S. President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire’s end Wednesday morning, putting the burial scheduled for the next day in question, these images of loving mourners of Khamenei have already had five days to flood the globe.This newsletter from NP Comment tackles the topics you care about. (Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays)By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againThe truce came at a staggering price — one the Western appeasement camp was only too eager to pay. When the strike killed Khamenei and left his anointed successor bleeding and hidden, the regime was as vulnerable as it had been since 1979. It was the moment to press. Instead, the West did what it has done for a quarter-century whenever Tehran wavers: it reached for the negotiating table and called the retreat peace.The Islamabad Memorandum, signed at Versailles in mid-June, reportedly delivered Tehran a $300-billion reconstruction plan, the removal of “all types” of sanctions, access to frozen billions, an acknowledged right to enrich uranium and permission to keep building ballistic missiles. Every one a former red line, surrendered while the regime was on its back. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi walked home boasting of oil waivers, a lifted port blockade and released assets. He wasn’t lying. That is the scoreboard.For proof of what appeasement buys, look at the Strait of Hormuz. The deal’s headline deliverable was keeping the strait open. Iran reclosed it on June 20 — three days after signing — and its negotiators now float a permanent tolling regime, actual charges for passage through the world’s most important energy chokepoint. The West went to war, killed the Supreme Leader, and negotiated an outcome in which the regime emerges with the standing to tax global oil traffic at will. That is not a chokehold loosened. It is a chokehold formalized, notarized and put on a payment plan — and sold back to us as freedom of navigation.Now watch the sham the money paid for. The entire production exists to solve a problem the regime cannot solve honestly: its new Supreme Leader is a fiction. Mojtaba Khamenei was installed in March under Revolutionary Guard pressure, wounded in the strike that killed his father, and has not been seen or heard since — not one public appearance, not one audio message. He will not attend his own father’s funeral.So, the state does what it always does: it substitutes spectacle for substance. It cannot show you the leader, so it shows you the crowd and dares you to call the crowd a mandate. Except the crowd is coerced. Iran International and others have documented the machinery — workplace orders driving municipal workers and autoworkers to the route, Basij enforcers threatening to seal any shop that opens, charities warned their permits depend on producing bodies, a leaked Tehran municipality recording ordering staff to attend regardless of young children or medical conditions.The number, engineered to beat the roughly 10 million at Khomeini’s 1989 funeral, is not grief. It is a quota filled by intimidation. And the world’s chancelleries oblige the theatre: Medvedev for Putin, a vice-chair of China’s parliament, Pakistan’s prime minister in person, the Taliban — all lending a wounded ghost the legitimacy he cannot generate himself.Canadians should recognize this regime for what the funeral is trying to disguise. This is the government that shot Flight PS752 out of the sky in 2020, murdering 55 Canadian citizens and dozens of permanent residents, then lied about it for days. It is the entity whose Revolutionary Guard Ottawa finally listed as a terrorist organization. It does not become respectable because 100 delegations showed up to a funeral we helped it afford.Here is the counterfactual the deal’s defenders will not discuss. In early March, the regime had a dead leader, an invisible successor, a shattered deterrent and no ceasefire to hide behind. Press that, and the crisis compounds in public. Instead the negotiators — and the chorus in Western capitals that has insisted for a generation that engagement moderates the mullahs — relieved the pressure at its peak and bankrolled the recovery. This week is what that choice looks like, rendered in marble and coerced millions.They will call the funeral proof of Iranian resilience. It is proof of the price of Western surrender. We did not lose this round at the table in Switzerland. We paid, in full and in advance, for the privilege of losing it in the streets of Tehran — and the receipt has the signatures right on it. Whether the funeral will now come to an unexpected end through Trump’s orders, as a result of Wednesday’s end of ceasefire announcement is yet to be seen.National PostAvideh Motmaen-Far is the president of the Council of Iranian Canadians. Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.