"Who was the Ayatollah Khomeini?"

[hammer]

Khomeini's real father, William Richard Williamson, was born in Bristol, England, in 1872 of British parents and lineage.


This detail is based on first-hand evidence from a former Iranian employee of the Anglo- Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum: BP), who worked with and met the key players of this saga. This fact was supported by the lack of a denial in 1979 by Col. Archie Chisholm, a BP political officer and former editor at "The Financial Times," when interviewed on the subject at his home in County Cork, Ireland, by a British newspaper.

The then-78-year old Chisholm stated: "I knew Haji [as Williamson was later known] well; he worked for me. He certainly went native but whether he is Khomeinis father I could not say." Would not an outright denial have been the natural response, were there no truth to the British paternity, especially from someone who knew Haji [and thus the truth] well?

Chisholm obviously wished to avoid a statement leading to political controversy or possible personal retribution in the very year Khomeini took over in Iran. Nor as a former, experienced political officer himself would he be willing to drag Britain into the new Middle East conflict. But neither was he prepared to provide an outright lie instead of his no comment.

How it all happened: A stocky, handsome, dark-haired Bristol boy, Richard Williamson ran away to sea at the age of 13 as a cabin boy, on a ship bound for Australia. However, he jumped ship before he got there. Little is known about him until he showed up, at the age of 20, in Aden at the Southern end of the Arabian Peninsula in South Yemen, where he joined the local police force.

His good looks soon had Sultan Fazl bin-Ali, ruler of Lahej, persuading him to quit the police force to live with him. Richard later left him for another Sheikh, Youssef Ebrahim, a relative of the Al-Sabah family, which rules Kuwait today.

A few points should be remembered about the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula area at that time. Regional countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and so forth did not exist as sovereign entities and were artificially created about 70 years ago by the British and French governments when they partitioned the area. Iran, or Persia as it was called, was soon to be controlled by Russian Cossacks in the North and the British Army in the South, although technically it remained an independent monarchy under the largely absentee Qajar dynasty.

British military presence in Iran was under Lt.-Col. Sykes (later Sir Percy Sykes), based in Shiraz, but politically controlled by Sir Arnold Wilson in Khorramshahr (then called Mohammareh) with assistance from E. Elkington in Masjid-Suleiman and Dr. Young, based in Ahwaz. All three were cities in the Khuzestan Province, which was later represented by Senator Moussavi.

Col. T.E. Lawrence, who gained fame as Lawrence of Arabia, operated out of Basra in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Khorramshahr during this same period. Oilfields, far beyond the technological capability of the Arab tribes (or Persia) to develop or appreciate as a valuable commodity, were being discovered and exploited by the British, including via the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, formed to siphon off oil from the Khuzestan Province in Southern Iran.

Kuwait, on the other side of the Persian Gulf, was still not a country at the time. As the major player in the Middle East oil industry, Britain had to exert influence and control through its political and oil personnel. Haji Abdollah Williamson became one of these in 1924 when he joined British Petroleum (BP) as political officer. He retired under that same name in 1937, at the age of 65. Earlier, in what is now Kuwait, Richard ("Haji") Williamson had very quickly converted to Islam and adopted the first name of Abdollah.

Family names were still unusual and 'son of the son of' or son of a type of worker or craftsman was still commonly used to identify people. For 14 years Williamson had lived among the Bedouin tribes on the Arabian Peninsula and in 1895 and 1898 he went on pilgrimages to Mecca, took on the rightful title of Haji, along with the name of his first benefactor, Fazl, adding Zobeiri to it as a distinguisher. Thus, William Richard Williamson became Haji Abdollah Fazl Zobeiri.

During his service with British Petroleum in the Persian Gulf, Haji Abdollah took his vacations in Indian Kashmir, to rest from the relentless heat of the Persian Gulf region, and in this time frame, married at least seven times to Arab and Indian women, each under Muslim marriage rituals. He sired 13 children of whom seven were boys and the rest girls with most of the children dying in early childhood. His repeated Kashmir excursions and Indian wives and use of the name Abdollah Fazl Zobeiri probably give rise to the Kashmir Indian father misconception.


The dark-haired Haji Abdollah became a fanatically devout Muslim, a characteristic he imposed on his children. This fervent religious attitude and Arab nomenclature would not normally be an expected combination for a foreigner, especially an Englishman. But nonetheless, in the order of Col. Lawrence of Arabia, Haji Williamson found a home in the Arabian Penninsula. He insisted his four surviving sons attend religious school in Najaf (in Iraq) under the tutelage of Ayatollahs Yazdi (meaning of the city of Yazd) and Shirazi (of the city of Shiraz). Two of them, Hindizadeh (meaning Indian born) and Passandideh (meaning pleasing or approved) studied well and eventually became ayatollahs in their own right.

The third boy, a troublesome young man, failed to make his mark in Najaf and went to the Iranian holy city of Qom, where he studied under Ayatollah Boroujerdi. When family names became a requirement by law under the rule of Reza Shah, the young man chose the city of his residence, Khomein, as the designator and took on the name Khomeini (meaning of Khomein).

The fourth son hated theology and went across the Persian Gulf to Kuwait and opened up two gas (petrol) stations using the paternal family name of Haji Ali Williamson, though it is unclear if he ever performed the Haj pilgrimage. This in-and-of itself links Khomeini through his brother to Haji Williamson. Why, otherwise, would Rouhallah Khomeini's undisputed brother use the Williamson family name?

The patriarch of this brood, Haji Abdollah Fazl Zobeiri (aka Haji Abdollah Williamson iof BP), was thrown out of Iran by Reza Shah along with three other British political officers for anti-Iranian activity and joined his son in Kuwait. Here he took on the duties of Oil Distribution for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. With his longstanding contacts in the Arab world and the Muslim religion, he forced a 50/50 agreement between US oil interests in Kuwait and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, as well as pursuing the exclusive exploration rights for British Petroleum in Abu Dhabi in 1932.

Haji Abdollah Williamson's lack of a formal education forced British Petroleum to send out Archie H. T. Chisholm (see above), a senior executive, to conclude the Abu Dhabi contract, and together with Haji Abdollah's political influence, they overcame competition from Major Frank Holmes, Sheikh Hussein and Mohammad Yateen to successfully land the exclusive contract.

Chisholm, as he said, got to know Khomeini's father well. Later in 1963, Khomeini saw an opportunity to not only revolt against the taking of lands from the religious foundations as per the White Revolution, but also to exact revenge for his father having been thrown out of Iran by imposing his Islamic fundamentalist philosophy onto an Iran, struggling with budget problems, caused mostly by its oil being in the control of foreign oil companies, which not only decided how much oil Iran was allowed to produce, but at what price it had to be sold.

With his own and his family's theological background, he began to foment an anti-monarchy revolt through the mosques,which by 1964 resulted in imposition of martial law and finally with his arrest and his being sentenced to death by hanging, and consequently being given the life-saving ayatollah title which he had not earned.

After formally being exiled to Turkey, he ended up in Iraq where he wrote some philosophical and social behavior dissertations which were so bizarre by religious standards that, where possible, the tracts were bought up and destroyed by the his supporters when he took over in 1979. The most damning were in Arabic language versions and then later, cleaner texts appeared as edited translations in Persian.

Some linguists, who studied his public speeches in 1979 and 1980, concluded his Persian vocabulary to be less than 200 words, so not only did he not have Persian blood, he did not even speak the language.


With the number of Iranians who have died because of him and his successors over the past 27 years going into the hundreds of thousands, if not well over a million if the death toll from the eight-year Iran-Iraq war is included, this Anglo-Indian with Arab Sunni Muslim theological and philosophical roots may have had no love nor compassion for Iranians after all. In fact, in the Iran Air aircraft flying Khomeini back from France to Tehran in early 1979, with cameras rolling, a journalist (the late Peter Jennings) asked Khomeini: "What do you feel about returning to Iran?" He replied: "Nothing." The question was repeated, and again he replied, "Nothing!"

http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/ex...iew.cgi/9/15316

[plasticfan]

thanks hammer. (just noticed this)

Apparently Khomeini spoke very little Farsi, and was heavily promoted by the BBC in a propaganda effort shortly prior to the Iranian Revolution....

more here....

Khomeini, The Iranian Revolution & The Arc of Crisis....
http://conspiracycentral.info/index.php?s=...st&p=148325