The Islamist regime in Iran bears responsibility for the attack, but the West enabled it.
By Reza Pahlavi via The Wall Street Journal
Aug. 18, 2022
In his masterpiece “The Satanic Verses,” Salman Rushdie wrote, “From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” Perhaps even Mr. Rushdie didn’t know how true that would prove in his own life. Months after its publication, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini invoked God to “call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill [Mr. Rushdie] without delay.” Last week, Hadi Matar nearly ended Mr. Rushdie’s life, seemingly in answer to the ayatollah’s call. While the Islamist regime in my country and the assailant it appears to have inspired bear responsibility for this attack, they were enabled by Western policy makers.
Those of us with firsthand experience of Tehran’s depravity have long warned the West against appeasing its threats. The regime has carried out assassinations from its first day, including of my cousin Shahriar Shafiq. When Khomeini first shamefully invoked God in his unjustifiable call for Mr. Rushdie’s death in 1989, I spoke with Western media and leaders about holding the regime to account for this wanton call to violence.
Wisely, the U.K. government at the time took steps to protect Mr. Rushdie and hold the Islamic Republic accountable. In response to the fatwa, London cut off diplomatic relations with Tehran. Three years later, the German government followed suit in response to the murder of Iranian dissidents within German borders. The regime had become a pariah.
This forced the Islamic Republic to keep a low profile. British and German citizens were largely safe from its machinations. The strong response from the West didn’t change Tehran’s destructive desires, but it did contain them. Now, however, it appears that Western powers on both sides of the Atlantic have forgotten the lessons that kept their citizens secure as well as the dissidents to whom they offered a haven. Though the Islamic Republic hasn’t compromised on its revolutionary and revisionist principles, over the past decade the regime has emerged from its former pariah status. Officials are now accepted at glitzy panels at international forums and attend headline-grabbing negotiations at Europe’s chicest hotels.
That acceptance has afforded the regime unprecedented and undeserved moral equivalency with the West. It has fostered confidence among Tehran’s radical followers the world over who see the regime as a source of revolutionary inspiration to radical action.
This shift to appeasement was never going to solve any of the world’s issues with the Islamic Republic. The regime’s problem with the West is the West’s very existence, which obstructs its path to a global caliphate. Any efforts to accommodate this radical regime are shows of weakness that Tehran can manipulate.
In the past several weeks, here in the U.S., three American citizens, including high-ranking officials, have nearly paid with their lives for the West’s ill-conceived policies. After the attack on Mr. Rushdie, a regime-run newspaper heralded the often-cited quote of my country’s current dictator, Ali Khamenei, saying the “arrow” shot by Khomeini “will one day hit the target.” Indeed it did and may prove debilitating as Mr. Rushdie remains in the hospital. Mr. Khamenei is sharpening more arrows and will take advantage of Western policy makers’ naiveté to point them at more innocents. That negotiations with Washington over a new nuclear deal continue in Vienna has shown Mr. Khamenei and his criminal cabal that they can effectively get away with murder.
The West’s lack of policy strategy also makes life worse for the regime’s longest-suffering victims, the people of Iran. It emboldens Tehran to treat us with greater impunity and demoralizes regime critics, who fear that the West is too timid to support their just cause.
I wish Mr. Rushdie a swift and complete recovery. This contemptible attack wasn’t an assault only on him, but on the West and all freethinkers. It is time for the world to heed the Iranian people’s calls to treat this regime like the rogue state it is and to aid my compatriots in their campaign for freedom.
Like the leaders of the 1990s, you must show Tehran that the West stands for its principles and its own citizens. If you don’t, I fear more arrows will strike more innocent people in the name of God.
Mr. Pahlavi is the eldest son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and an advocate of secular democracy for Iran.
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