The Right Side of History Magazine, No. 36

On November 4, 1979, Iranian university students seized the American embassy and recovered the documents that laid bare decades of conspiracy against the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian people. That discovery turned a date on the calendar into a national reckoning, and Iran has since marked it as National Students' Day and the National Day of Fighting Global Arrogance.

In "Words of Wisdom" and "Word for Word," the martyred Leader's words from that same period carry the weight of a reckoning still underway: that it was the US, not Iran, that began the aggression — sheltering the nation's executioner and using its embassy as a den of espionage; that Iran did not rise up for itself alone, but for all oppressed peoples in the Muslim and non-Muslim countries; and that the Iranian nation, having torn the chains from its own hands, now stands at the axis of history, facing down the satanic power of imperialism — a power whose ships, he warned, will be shattered to splinters when the ocean of the wrath of nations is stirred.

Featuring a "Memorable Frame" from April 14, 1980, when Martyr Imam Khamenei visited the detained embassy staff. John Limbert, speaking fluent Persian, complained with sarcasm about his detainment — and was told plainly: the students do not want you here at all. The key is not in their hands, nor in ours, but in the hands of those who refuse to answer a nation's legitimate demand. He [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi] is a criminal. He must come here and stand trial.

In "Opinion," Dr. Foad Izadi examines whether the seizure was rational or impulsive — arguing through Article 41 of the Vienna Convention that embassies cannot violate the laws of their host or interfere in its affairs, that the Americans had done so for years, and that what the students carried out was, in the American legal lexicon itself, a citizen's arrest.