Iran's Leaders at War with Western Civilization

At the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, everything changed when Said and Sharif 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 are at war with it.

Never, before Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power, was a writer forced to live under the threat of deliberate murder, with a bounty on his head, for criticizing Islam. 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 US embassy in Teheran. When Donald Trump pulled the US out of the nuclear deal, Iranian MPs in their Parliament burned the American flag. In the last few months, Iranian girls who took off their veil were arrested and beaten. It was Iran that made chador a symbol of political Islam. A woman wrapped in a black chador, the most severe form of hijab, has become one of the most visible images of the Islamic Republic.

Women never used to be covered in Egypt, Syria Afghanistan, Turkey, the Maghreb. Khomeini changed all that; he called it 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 in France started the Islamic scarf controversy. A school principal told three Muslim teenagers that they could not attend high school in Creil due to the France's Contitutional commitment to secularism. The Islamic community started to fight for the right to veil their girls at schools. "We will keep it until we die", the Islamic fundamentalists in France chanted.

The hijab was first distributed by the Iranian embassy in Algiers. In Tunisia, the secular government was excommunicated by the Iranian fundamentalists after 1981, when the Tunisian government issued a circular prohibiting the use of a hijab in schools and public offices. In recent years, Iran has also managed to impose the hijab on a large number of European leaders and ministers visiting the country, thereby placing them in a humiliating state of cultural and symbolic subjugation.

Never, before Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power, was a writer forced to live under the threat of deliberate murder, with a bounty on his head, for criticizing Islam. Before the Iranian Revolution, no Arab writer was marked for death. Since Khomeini, murdering literary dissidents has become a routine

The Iranian ayatollahs were the first formally to persecute the Christian populations in the Middle East. Today, Iran is on list of Open Doors' ten 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 orbit of the Qatar-Iran axis. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood openly sided with Khomeini's revolutionaries as they overthrew the Shah, and 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. In public places, revolutionaries attacked people who did not respect the stringent new codes of dress and behavior. Then, there were no Taliban, no ISIS, no Boko Haram. Since the Iranian Revolution, the idea of including sharia in national laws has spread throughout the Islamic world. After the revolution, 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, broadcasting was forbidden.

The idea of using children as human bombs originated in 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, the baby suicide bombers made their appearance in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and Afghanistan.

The fatwas against "blasphemous" writers, the veiling of women, the attacks against Jews worldwide, the persecution of Christians, the abuse of children, the imposition of Islamic law... All these have been the poisoned fruits of Khomeini's revolution and the most direct challenges to the central features of the Western civilization. Will Europe – the cradle of Western culture and civilization – open its eyes and stop regularly taking the side of the Iran's tyrannical ayatollahs?

© Gatestone Institute

---

Editor's note: this text was originally published on May 20, 2018. In fact, the first paragraph alluded to President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal: