Mike Wallace: “Surely, your majesty, you’re not telling me that the Jewish Lobby in the United States pulls the strings of the presidency?”

The Shah: “Not entirely but I think even a little too much even for Israel’s interests.”

Mike Wallace: “You think the Jewish Lobby in the United States is too powerful for the interests of Israel?”

The Shah: “I think so. Sometimes they are disserving the interests of Israel because they’re pushing around too many people, well pressuring.

…They have many means at their disposal.

…Newspaper, media, banks, finance and I am going to stop here. They are putting pressure on many, many people. At the end, I don’t think that it will even help Israel.”

Mike Wallace: “Wait just a second, you really do believe that the Jewish community of the United States is so powerful they make the media reflect their view of foreign policy?”

The Shah: “Yes.”

Mike Wallace: “They don’t report honestly?”

The Shah: “Don’t mix things please. Don’t say the media. I’ll say in the media they have people — not the entire media. Some newspapers will only reflect their views.”

By the end of the decade, the Shah was deposed, with apparent complicity by elements in our nation’s own wholly corrupted national security apparatus.

Declassified documents revealed that the Carter Administration was indirectly communicating with Khomeini and other opposition leaders, contradicting the widely disseminated narrative that the Carter Administration was wholly surprised by the Iranian Revolution.

Iran And The Shah. What Really Happened?

…Long regarded as a U.S. ally, the Shah was pro-Western and anti-communist, and he was aware that he posed the main barrier to Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. As distinguished foreign-affairs analyst Hilaire du Berrier noted: “He determined to make Iran capable of blocking a Russian advance until the West should realize to what extent her own interests were threatened and come to his aid…. It necessitated an army of 250,000 men.” The Shah’s air force ranked among the world’s five best. A voice for stability within the Middle East itself, he favored peace with Israel and supplied the beleaguered state with oil.

On the home front, the Shah protected minorities and permitted non-Muslims to practice their faiths. “All faith,” he wrote, “imposes respect upon the beholder.” The Shah also brought Iran into the 20th century by granting women equal rights. This was not to accommodate feminism, but to end archaic brutalization.

Yet, at the height of Iran’s prosperity, the Shah suddenly became the target of an ignoble campaign led by U.S. and British foreign policy makers. Bolstered by slander in the Western press, these forces, along with Soviet-inspired communist insurgents, and mullahs opposing the Shah’s progressiveness, combined to face him with overwhelming opposition. In three years he went from vibrant monarch to exile (on January 16, 1979), and ultimately death, while Iran fell to Ayatollah Khomeini’s terror.

This post was edited on 3/29/26 at 12:31 pm