Weekly Commentary

Of Mullahs, Nukes, and Cartoons

On February 14 1989, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s fundamentalist regime, issued a fatwa against the British author Salman Rushdie. At the time, the regime having accepted defeat in the eight-year war with Iraq was engulfed in internal conflicts and crumbling under domestic and international pressure.

Khomeini had been forced to "drink from the chalice of poison of the ceasefire," as he put it, in war he had insisted was a “divine blessing,” and the gateway to "liberating Jerusalem via Karbala”.

The death decree against Rushdie was not the only such edict Khomeini had issued. Several months prior, in summer of 1988, he authorized the horrific massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners. The mass killings brought scant international scrutiny. It however, caused deep factional schism and challenge to Khomeini’s role as the Supreme leader when his designate-successor Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri launched a devastating political assault on ailing Khomeini by questioning the massacre of thousands of defenseless prisoners, including pregnant women.

It was under these circumstances that he issued his infamous decree against Rushdie. For Khomeini, the Satanic Verses was another “divine blessing” with which he could re-assert his diminished ideological authority, bring into line of his severely shaken ideological base, and shift the focus of restive populace. The ever-shrewd and diabolically opportunist Khomeini turned Rushdie’s book into his own Satanic ploy.

Here we go again. Seventeen years later, Khomeini’s heirs find themselves walking on a more precarious political, ideological, and diplomatic tightrope. Having purged his allies of the post-Khomeini era, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has propelled the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to the position of power. While this has benefited him in the short term, it has nevertheless undercut his power base within the regime and led to growing public discontent, reflected in labor strikes, student sit-ins, and citizen unrest.

Most significant, however, has been the aftermath of the landmark decision by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Tehran to the United Nations Security Council.

Judging by the hasty and desperate measures Tehran took right after the vote to minimize the domestic fall out, the decision has dealt one of the most devastating diplomatic blows to the regime since its inception. It has simply plunged the regime’s diplomacy machine in chaos as evident by its frantic and contradictory moves in recent days.

Against this backdrop, after several weeks - if not several months – of delay, Tehran rulers found the “divine blessing” of the inflammatory cartoons published in some European publications.

No doubt, the cartoons were of utter poor taste and insulting to religious sensitivities of the millions of Muslims around the world. The mullahs' claims to be a defender of religious tolerance and Muslims’ sensitivities, however, is a shameless exercise in demagoguery considering the tens of thousands of Muslim Iranian dissidents they have executed, imprisoned and tortured since 1979. Majority of the victims of political executions in Iran have been the members and supporters of Iran’s main opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin, the staunchly anti-fundamentalist Muslim organization.

And let’s not forget that it was Iran’s Intelligence Ministry which carried out the deadly bombing in Iran’s most revered Shia shrine in city of Mashad in mid 1990s that left dozens of worshippers dead or injured.

For Iran rulers the cartoon crisis is a reincarnation of the Rushdie crisis. They jumped on this band wagon to shift domestic focus from their recent devastating diplomatic defeat to an external boogeyman and to give a sense of ideological empowerment to the paramilitary Bassij forces.

This perverted state-sponsored mob-diplomacy, a skill the clerical regime has mastered and put into effect time after time since 1979, was also meant as a warning to the Europeans, which explains the attacks on some European embassies in Tehran by Molotov-cocktail throwing government-organized mobs.

Behind this well-choreographed exercise in mob-diplomacy, however, there is an utterly isolated regime and a renewed determination by the restive populace bent on challenging it at every opportunity.

The daring strike by Tehran's bus drivers is a case in point. Despite the barbaric attempts by the security forces to crush it, the strike has continued and could well spread to other sectors. Meanwhile, over the weekend, the Iranian Sufi Muslims gathered in city of Qom to reclaim their place of worship. They made a heroic stand which was brutally crushed after hours of resistance. Hundreds of Sufis have been wounded and arrested by the plain-cloth agents and security forces. Their property was set on fire by state-organized mobs. (USADI)
 

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The US Alliance for Democratic Iran (USADI), is a US-based, non-profit, independent organization, which promotes informed policy debate, exchange of ideas, analysis, research and education to advance a US  policy on Iran which will benefit America’s interests, both at home and in the Middle East, through supporting Iranian people’s  aspirations for a democratic, secular, and peaceful government, free of tyranny, fundamentalism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism.

USADI supports the Iranian peoples' aspirations for democracy, peace,  human rights, women’s equality, freedom of expression, separation of  church and state, self-determination, control of land and resources,  cultural integrity, and the right to development and prosperity.

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