These are no idle threats. In early 2007, law professor Glenn Reynolds posited in a post on the right-wing website Instapundit that, with regard to alleged Iranian involvement in resistance activity in Iraq, the United States “should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian [sic] atomic scientists, [and] supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran.” Reynolds continued,
“[T]o be clear, I think it’s perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries — like Iran — that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses.”
The fact that not a single Iranian official in recent memory has ever threatened to build nuclear weapons, let alone use them “against America and its allies,” is beside the point. So is the fact that the United States has explicit laws against political assassination. The point is that Reynolds, a law professor, was calling for the willful murder of Iranians – government officials, religious leaders, scientists and academics – who have never been charged with or found guilty of any crime and who pose absolutely no threat to the United States or its citizens.
Less than a month earlier, in January 2007, a senior Iranian nuclear physicist and professor at Shiraz University working at the uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, was found dead in his apartment. While some publications attributed his death to an explosion in his laboratory, other reports claimed he was assassinated by the Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, using “radioactive poisoning.”
In addition, the day after Reynolds posted his assassination wishlist, a bomb explosion killed at least 18 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan. Responsibility for the bombing was subsequently claimed by the Iranian separatist group Jundallah, which has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in the region and has financial ties to the United States. Since then, at least 164 Iranians have been murdered in similar actions undertaken by Jundallah, the most recent occurring on December 15, when at least 38 worshippers celebrating the holiday Ashura were killed, and over 50 wounded, in a suicide bombing outside a mosque in the city of Chabahar.
In November of this year, the U.S. State Department finally designated Jundallah as a terrorist organization.
On September 22, 2010, twelve people were killed and at least 80 injured in a bombing at a military parade in the West Azerbaijani city of Mahabad in northwest Iran. The Kurdish separatist group Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), which also has connections to the United States and Israel, may have been behind the attack.
Early this year, on January 12, 2010, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a 50-year-old Iranian nuclear physicist and professor at Tehran University, was killed outside his home “when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded as he left for work.” The blast, which shattered nearby windows in northern Tehran’s Qeytariyeh neighborhood, was activated by a remote trigger. Ali Mohammadi was a lecturer and researcher with “no prominent political voice, no published work with military relevance and no declared links to Iran’s nuclear program.” The New York Times reported that Ali Mohammadi taught neutron physics and “was the author of several articles on quantum and theoretical physics in scientific journals.” Experts agree the victim “was not involved in the country’s nuclear program,” that his writing, given its highly abstract nature, has “virtually no military applications and that “nuclear physicists interested in bomb-making would have no interest in these papers.”
But calls for the assassination of Iranian scientists didn’t stop there. This past July, former CIA operative, death squad and genocide enthusiast, and current neocon blowhard, Reuel Marc Gerecht penned an article for The Weekly Standard entitled “Should Israel Bomb Iran? Better safe than sorry.” In addition to advocating the illegal and immoral murder of thousands of Iranians because their country’s defiance of U.S. and Israeli demands to relinquish its inalienable rights, Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Zionist Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, kvetched, “If the Israelis (or, better, the Americans under President Bush) had struck Iran’s principal nuclear facilities in 2003 and killed many of the scientists and technical support staff, Khamenei’s nuclear program likely would have taken years, even decades, to recover.”
On November 29, 2010, as American pundits and politicians were busy calling for the murder of Julian Assange, two separate but connected incidents occurred. Two of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were attacked on their way to work by “men on motorbikes who attached bombs to the windows of their cars” and then detonated them from a distance. One of the scientists, Dr. Majid Shahriari, a member of the nuclear engineering department of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, was killed. Shahriari had published dozens of esoteric conference reports and peer-reviewed articles on nuclear research and is said to have managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization. The Guardian reported that “Shahriari had no known links to banned nuclear work, but was highly regarded in his field.” His wife was injured in the attack. The other scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, and his wife were also wounded.
“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” an anonymous U.S. official who assesses scientific intelligence told The New York Times. “They’re both top scientists.”
Both Dr. Mohammadi, who was assassinated in January, and Dr. Shahriari were associated with a non-nuclear scientific research unit known as Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) which is based in Jordan and operating under United Nations auspices.
The day after the attacks on Shahriari and Abbasi, Yossi Melman, the senior terrorism and intelligence commentator for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, reported on the connection between the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable release, the assassination of Iranian scientists, and the appointment of a new head of the Mossad, all of which occurred the same day. Melman wrote:
“They are part of the endless efforts by the Israeli intelligence community, together with its Western counterparts including Britain’s MI6 and America’s CIA, to sabotage, delay and if possible, to stop Iran from reaching its goal [sic] of having its first nuclear bomb.”
Melman, who publicized the mysterious death of Hosseinpour in 2007, stated that, regarding the new attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, “it is obvious…that Israel was behind it.”
Less than two weeks later, on December 12, the Washington Post‘s new neoconservative, warmongering columnist Jennifer Rubin made a number of suggestions about how the United States should “deal” with Iran’s nuclear program. In addition to supporting Iran’s small opposition movement and beginning to “make the case and agree on a feasible plan for the use of force,” Rubin wrote, in back-to-back bullet points,
“Second, we should continue and enhance espionage and sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program. Every nuclear scientist who has a ‘car accident’ and every computer virus buys us time, setting back the timeline for Iran’s nuclear capability, while exacting a price for those who cooperate with the nuclear program. Think of it as the ultimate targeted sanction. Third, we need to make human rights a central theme in our bilateral and multilateral diplomacy regarding Iran.”
As Salon‘s Justin Elliott summarized, “Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists,” continuing that “even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.”
This is certainly not the first time Rubin, who has written that “nearly all wisdom” can be found in the Torah (and the first two Godfather movies), has contradicted herself within the span of a sentence or two. In her very first Washington Post blog, Rubin declared her ideological belief in “American exceptionalism, limited government, free markets, a secure and thriving Jewish state, defense of freedom and human rights around the world, enforced borders with a generous legal immigration policy, calling things by their proper names (e.g. Islamic fundamentalism), and recapturing vocabulary (a ‘feminist’ is not the same as a pro-choice activist).” How one can believe simultaneously in “freedom and human rights” and a “secure and thriving” heavily-militarized and inherently discriminatory ethnocracy is unclear, unless of course the “world” doesn’t include Palestinians. Also, so long as things are being “called by their proper names” and vocabulary is being “recaptured,” writers like Rubin, Reynolds and Gerecht should undoubtedly be labeled as what they are: Zionist apologists who advocate the murder of innocent people to advance their own political and ideological agendas; in other words, they are proponents of terrorism.
Nima Shirazi – protected by the freedoms that America has given him and his family, through the bleeding and bloodletting of countless warriors in the name of freedom. Your protection under the Ist Amendment is solid and allows you to speak, write and continue to breathe, unlike outspoken dissidents in other parts of the world – you’re welcome. And welcome to our tribe. . .
“You’re welcome”? Who was I thanking? You? For what? Did you bestow my Constitutional Rights unto me? Did you “protect” my “freedoms”? If so, how, when, where…and against whom? Who was trying to take my “freedoms” away from me?
And into who’s “tribe” am I being welcomed? By whom? You? Are you the vanguard of American citizenship? I received my American citizenship when I was born here. If you’re welcoming me into my own country, you’re mighty late. But…thanks?
Send Bradley a card this season, he’s been in solitary since May.
http://www.bradleymanning.org/15364/holiday-cards-for-bradley-mannings-freedom/
I certainly hope that those who read your reference to how I “ruminated on what would happen in Iran if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been assassinated” click on the link you provided so they are not left with the incorrect impression that I advocate his murder.
Like this piece, my posting was prompted by calls, then, for Ahmadinejad’s assassination and includes this passage:
“But an Iranian expert at Columbia University says, hypothetically, should someone successfully kill Ahmadinejad, the results could be the exact opposite of the intent.
“‘Evidently there was no assassination attempt, or if there was the regime is underplaying it,'” says Iranian studies professor Hamid Dabashi. ‘And fortunately so, because any major act of violence at this point is bound to radicalize the regime, militarize its security apparatus even further, and push Iran further to the edge of abyss’.”
Gary,
Thanks for chiming in on this. I certainly did not intend to insinuate that you advocated murder.
In fact, I very purposefully chose the phrase “ruminated on” (rather than, say, “advocated,” “encouraged,” “suggested,” or “called for”) to describe your approach to a hypothetical Ahmadinejad assassination attempt.
I do think, however, that even postulating on such a thing – even rhetorically – acts as a way to mainstream the notion of assassination as something legitimate. You certainly never condemn such an act.
Your article also lends credence to the widely-espoused anti-Iran propaganda machine that demonizes the Iranian government in general, and the president, in particular.
You describe Ahmadinejad as “the man who symbolizes oppression of the Iranian people,” without taking any time to acknowledge his immense popularity within Iran. Quite the contrary, you only quote Prof. Dabashi, who – as everyone knows – is a staunch and stubborn opponent of Ahmadinejad and refuses to accept that Ahmadinejad actually won last year’s reelection fairly, despite the fact that all available evidence shows quite clearly that this is the case.
You also note Ahmadinejad’s “frequent provocative statements” yet you don’t state what they are. A reader is left with the impression that you believe – as is so often repeated in the mainstream media – that Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and denied that the Holocaust ever happened, neither of which is true. As a journalist, you should know better than to repeat long-debunked and deliberately demonizing accusations.
Further, by asking whether “things [might] suddenly improve for the Iranian people” (or merely stay the same) were Ahmadinejad to be killed, you again play into the notion that the Iranian government is not viewed favorably in Iran and that the Iranian people not only view themselves as victims of severe government oppression, but that they long for regime change and a new form of government.
Over the past few years, numerous polls have shown these ideas to be unfounded. For instance, in several post-election polls in Iran, more than 70% of respondents said they saw Ahmadinejad as the legitimate, democratically-elected president of the country and around 80% viewed the 2009 election as free and fair.
Additionally, more than 80% of Iranians polled said they were satisfied with the current system of government.
A poll conducted this past September (over a year after the election and aftermath) finds that about 60% of Iranians say they voted for Ahmadinejad – a percentage which is not only consistent with every single pre- and post-election survey, but also essentially matches the official results.
Also, this recent poll, conducted by the International Peace Institute, revealed (unsurprisingly to those who have been paying attention) that only about one-third of Iranians view opposition leaders Mousavi and Karroubi favorably, while a mere 26% have positive feelings about the so-called “Green Movement.”
These findings are, once again, completely in line with last year’s election results.
Nearly 60% of respondents also said that the government’s response to the riots and protests which followed the vote was appropriate (19% said the reaction “went too far”). Iranians also continue to support the combination of a theocratic and republican government (which it currently has), though they overwhelmingly believe that Iran will become more democratized over the next decade.
Your article, by using only the words of Dabashi and no other voice, never speaks of assassination as immoral or illegal, only as impractical. Dabashi states that “any major act of violence” would “radicalize the regime” and “push Iran further to the edge of abyss.” What abyss is this, I wonder? You never explain.
Stating that Ahmadinejad is the symbol of Iranian oppression is disingenuous to say the least. Remember, he’s the one who called for women to be allowed to attend soccer games shortly after his first inauguration. He was lambasted by the religious conservatives. He has also, repeatedly, stated his belief that the government has better things to do than restrict women’s clothing and police public “immodesty.”
Just this past summer (two months before you wrote your piece), Ahmadinejad publicly stated his opposition to the dress-code crackdown, saying, “The government does not agree with this behavior and will respond to and control it as much as it can. It is an insult to ask a man and woman walking on the street about their relation to each other. Nobody has the right to ask such questions.”
These reports are consistent with a recent diplomatic cable from Baku, Azerbaijian and released by WikiLeaks this month. The cable reports that, during a Supreme National Security Council meeting in mi-January 2010, Ahmadinejad spoke of the Iranian people feeling “suffocated,” and advocating the necessity of “more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press.” In response to such a suggestion, an “infuriated Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari” yelled at the president and “slapped [him] in the face, causing an uproar.”
This is your “man who symbolizes oppression”? Hardly.
Thanks again for reading, reposting my article, and getting in touch.
Best,
Nima
I note that nowhere do you say that killing Ajad would “wrong”, “immoral” or even “illegal” under US and International law.
“Attorney General Eric Holder stated his belief that “national security of the United States has been put at risk”?
People have forgotten that 36 years ago in 1974 a former top Senior CIA whom become a Whistle-blower said that the CIA and Henry Kissinger took part in training the Police and the Military of the country of South America in killing over 6.000.000 millions innocent man, women, and children that were accussed of beirn “Communists” when they were not Communists at all they just oppossed the USA Government Nuclear Missiles Programs. In fact the former CIA said that if one of the South American countries had the Nuclear Bomb to Nuke the USA the CIA could not have carried out Terrorism against innocent civilians who were not Muslims at all. The USA country has been Threatening themselves by Bullying the world long before the war of Iraq and Afghanistian but they blame others Nations because “The USA Cannot Handle The Truth”. The USA Government will poo their own trousers if a country of South America goes Nuclear to Revenge themselves for all the Crimes that the CIA and Henry Kissinger have committed against them. Those people of South America were not Muslims at all they were rival Christians who did not like the Catholics pedophiles. The USA has an history of protecting Catholics pedophiles because there are 60 Millions of them living in the USA country. The USA Government and their CIA showed not Respect so soon or later the USA will become like Sodom and Gomorrah because their crimes has reached Heaven. The Muslims will never take the glory away from the people of South America because more Rival Christians died in South America than all of those Muslims who died in Iraq and Afhganistan. The Hell with the Muslims, the Catholis, the USA and the CIA and that idiot with a short memory call Attorney General Eric Holder.