Strange Bedfellows

I thought the title of the leader's comment in yesterday's Telegraph, "strange bedfellows", was a very suitable choice.
If you read any of the memoires by Iranian ex-political prisoners who were imprisoned by the Islamic regime for their Marxist sympathies, or speak to them in person, they will tell you that the regime's abhorrence for the Marxist prisoners was so profound that the prison guards were told not to have any skin contact with the untouchable - najes - atheists. When the Marxist prisoners were taken to interrogation, the guards would tell the prisoners to hold the end of a rolled up newspaper or a stick, so that the pious Muslim guard would not become polluted by having skin contact with the infidel.

After the massacre of Iranian political prisoners in 1988, the bodies of the victims were dumped in mass graves next to a Bahaii cemetery. The public became alerted of the mass graves only when they noticed large gathering of over enthusiastic stray dogs, scavenging for bones.

I remember the speech by Fakhreddin Hejazi, broadcast from Islamic state radio, at the beginning of the "cultural revolution". He was livid at having seen posters of Marx and Lenin in Iranian universities and was threatening and rebuking the infidel students for having put up posters of such atheists after the Islamic revolution.

So how is it that now, the North Koreans, Castro, Ortega, Putin's ex-KGB Mafia, are all best friends of the Islamic Republic? Indeed they all make strange bedfellows. Who knows, may be straight after their meetings, the Islamic Republic officials perform ablution rites. For now however, it is their common interest of survival in power that keeps them close together.