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Typically, Fallaci pulled no punches and started out with what she calls my toughest questions." One of them was directed to the charge that people were now calling Khomeini a dictator. "It hurts me," the Ayatullah answered, "because it is unjust and inhuman to call me a dictator. On the other hand, I couldn't care less, because I know that wickedness is a part of human nature, and such wickedness comes from our enemies. Considering the road that we have chosen, a road that is opposed to the superpowers it is normal that the servants of foreign interests prick me with their poison and hurl all kinds of calumnies against me. . . Dictatorship is the greatest sin in the religion of Islam. Fascism and Islamism are absolutely incompatible. Fascism arises in the West, not among people of Islamic culture. . . Fascism would be possible only if the Shah were to return or if Communism were to take over."
For the most part, Khomeini fielded the questions with aplomb, calmly denying many of the charges raised in the West against his rule. He denied that leftists played a major role in the revolution "None of them fought or suffered. If anything, they took advantage of the people who fought and suffered." Khomeini also charged that the left had been created by the Americans "to launch slanders against us, to sabotage and destroy us." It was of no consequence, he said, that Iran would not be called an Islamic Democratic Republic, since the "word Islam does not need adjectives such as democratic. Precisely because Islam is everything, it means everything." He defended the paramount role that the clergy will play under the new constitution: "Since people love the clergy, have faith in the clergy, it is right that the supreme religious authority should oversee the work of the Prime Minister or of the President of the Republic, to make sure that they don't go against the law, that is, against the Koran."
Khomeini defended the trials and executions of 600 people since the revolution on the ground that those found guilty had been involved in tortures and massacres. But he became somewhat agitated when Fallaci cited executions of those convicted of adultery, prostitution or homosexuality. "If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Letting the whole hand and then the body become filled with gangrene, or cutting the finger off?. . . Corruption, corruption. We have to eliminate corruption."
One thing the Ayatullah does seem to know: that Iran's revolution will go its own way regardless of what outsiders think. "If you foreigners do not understand, too bad for you," he said at one point. "It's none of your business. If some Persians don't understand it, too bad for them. It means they have not understood Islam."