The United States just withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal. The move is fully justified not only on the grounds of security, but primarily because Iran’s Khomeinist revolution is a deadly and propulsive ideology that the West cannot allow to become a nuclearized one.
For the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, everything changed when Said and Cherif Kouachi murdered 11 people in its Paris office. Among the texts recovered on the Kouachi brothers’ laptop was the Iranian call for death against the novelist Salman Rushdie, calling it “fully justified.” The killers were inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s deadly edict against Rushdie. The bloodbath at Charlie Hebdo is one of the poisoned fruits of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian ayatollahs fear the allure of Western culture. That is why, since 1979, they have been at war with it.
Before the Iranian Revolution, no Arab writer was marked for death. Since Khomeini, murdering literary dissidents has become a routine: the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout, the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda, Turkish writers murdered in Sivas, and recently butchered bloggers from Bangladesh. The fatwa against Rushdie was one of Iran’s most successful attacks on Western civilization and efforts to intimidate the West.
U.S. flag-burning and chanting “Death to America” became common in the Middle East only after the Iranian takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. When Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal, Iranian MPs in their parliament burned the American flag. In the past few months, Iranian girls who took off their veils were arrested and beaten. It was Iran that made chador, the most severe form of hijab, a symbol of political Islam.
Women never used to be covered in Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey and the Maghreb. Khomeini changed all that; he called the veil “a flag of the revolution.” It is not a coincidence that 1989 was not only the year of Rushdie’s fatwa but also when the Islamic scarf controversy started in France. A school principal told three Muslim teenagers they could not attend high school in Creil due to France’s constitutional commitment to secularism.
The Iranian ayatollahs were the first to formally persecute the Christian populations in the Middle East. Today, Iran is on the list of Open Doors’ 10 worst countries for Christians. The idea of attacking Jewish communities around the world is also an Iranian invention: in 1992 and 1994, the Jewish community and the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires were blown up. Until Iran’s revolution, no country had promoted a false Holocaust denial.
The archipelago of political Islam in Europe, from Tariq Ramadan to the Muslim Brotherhood, revolves around the Qatar-Iran axis. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood openly sided with Khomeini’s revolutionaries as they overthrew the Shah, and it now threatens Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others in the region.
In the early years of the revolution, a ferocious puritanism hit the nation. Thousands of “prostitutes,” drug addicts and homosexuals were executed. For the first time, the Iranians declared war on their own cultural life: theaters were closed, concerts were banned, entertainers fled the country, cinemas were confiscated and broadcasting was forbidden.
The idea of using children as human bombs was also advanced by Iran. As the German scholar Matthias Küntzel wrote, “Khomeini was the first to develop a full-blown death cult.” During the Iran-Iraq war, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported thousands of plastic keys from Taiwan. The ayatollah sent these Iranian children through the Iraqi minefields in the direction of the enemy to open a gap with their bodies. Before each mission, Iranian children were given a key to hang around their neck; they were told it would open the doors to paradise.
Since then, babies as suicide bombers made their appearance in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and Afghanistan.
By Giulio Meotti/Gatestone
Giulio Meotti, cultural editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
