Zahra Kazemi: Who Ordered IRI Murder of a Journalist Sam Ghandchi
http://www.ghandchi.com/234-journalist.htm
Zahra Kazemi: Who Ordered IRI Murder of a Journalist
Sam Ghandchi
http://www.ghandchi.com/234-journalist.htm
P.S. July 11, 2018: This article was written 15 years ago just 20 days after the murder of Zahra Kazemi which occurred on July 11, 2003. At the time, I had speculated the killing of her being a fatwa killing. They have now tried and convicted Saeed Mortazavi in Iran for the crime and no Ayatollah has been named as issuer of a fatwa to kill her. Of course no Ayatollah has been named as the issuer of fatwa to kill Forouhars either, but everyone knows the name of the Ayatollah who issued the fatwa to kill Forouhars. SG
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It is about a month since the Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra
Kazemi was murdered by Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and we are now
hearing that the permission of her mother to bury her in Iran has
been by force so that they can clean up the evidence of the murder
which had happened when she was been in custody of IRI justice
department. IRI is announcing everyday that they have arrested some
individuals in relation to the murder and IRI diplomats claim the
culprits will be punished. Are these events and the IRI promises
anything new?
Many already have noted the similarities with the murder of
Forouhars and writers that happened over three years ago when IRI
made similar announcements, first denying that they were killed by
IRI, and later blaming Zionists and the Kurds for the murders, and
finally blaming it on some rogue elements in its own security
system, and inside prison, they killed Saeed Emami who was allegedly
the head of the operation and they said it was a suicide. Are they
going to call the death of Zahra Kazemi the work of rogue elements?
Does it matter how IRI reframes these events for the world public
opinion?
The reality is that none of these murders is new and the Islamist
murder of opponents became a state-sponsored activity since
Islamists came to power in Iran, but their murdering activity
existed long before Islamists come to power in Iran, although they
were not always supported by the state in the pre-IRI Iran. Fatwa
killing has always been part of Islamism. Although the world got to
see what it means with Khomeini's fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie,
Iranians have known fatwa killing especially since the fatwa killing
of Ahmad Kasravi the top scholar of Iran in the years before the
1953 coup, during the years of semi-democracy in Iran of 1941-1953.
To understand the murder of Zahra Kazemi, we should not believe some
Islamists who shed crocodile tears for the victims, but have always
been silent about the fatwa killing as a reality of Islamism. Why
don't they say who has issued the fatwas for killing Forouhars and
the writers although they all know about it. The question we should
ask is why the fatwa killing of Ahmad Kasravi? Why the Khomeini
fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie? And why are these so-called
"progressive" Islamists' silent on all those occasions? When did
these Islamic reformists condemn Khomeini's fatwa to kill Salman
Rushdie which is an open fact and they cannot dismiss it as an
speculation?
The answer is that Islamists give their message to different groups
of their opponents this way. They killed Ahmad Kasravi because there was a
large group of scholars who had started to challenge Islamic dogma
in Iran of those semi-democracy years of 1941-1953 and Islamists
killed Kasravi to show their fist to this rising group of scholars.
In 1980's, Salman Rushdie was among many literary authors worldwide,
who started challenging Islamic dogma in novel, and he was picked to
show the Islamists' iron fist, to scare these authors from
challenging Islamism.
Later the IRI Islamists did not just stop at killing Dr. Boroumad, Dr. Bakhtiar,
Dr. Ghassemlou
and Kurdish leaders in Europe and killed Forouhars inside Iran to
clearly give the message to political activists, who had decided to
work within the confines of IRI constitution, that if they
challenged Islamists, they would not be spared; and Forouhars' lack
of support for Khatami had done the trick to be picked by Islamists
as target. Mr. Khatami who has the murderous judge of Islamist
courts Khalkhali, sitting on his side as a so-called "reformist,"
surely knows who had issued the fatwa to kill Forouhars, but he kept
playing the hide and seek game to catch the so-called rogue elements
year after year?
Why did they kill the unknown writers like Mokhtari alongside
Forouhars? Again the goal was the message that even as an unknown
human rights activist inside Iran, you will not be spared if you
challenge the Islamists' rule. It has become actually a tough
question to answer why specifically Pooyandeh and Mokhtari were
picked as the prime target, even though they were hardly known
inside Iran, and were not as famous as many other authors. It may be
very hard to answer why X is picked and not Y. This question is even
hard to answer in the case of Islamists' picking of Kasravi or
Rushdie as targets! Why those specific individuals? The truth is
that it is very hard to read the mind of the fanatic Ayatollahs and
depending on which one of their followers has provided them the
reports about the victims, they decide for whom to issue a kill
fatwa.
Sometimes a real objective analysis shows that the victim is not
that important in his/her social impact, but the Ayatollah who
issues the fatwa has come to the understanding to see that
individual as the threat. The fact of the matter is that it is not
that important who is picked, because Ayatollahs will pick a victim,
when they see Islamism needs a new sacrificial victim among a
specific group of population that is challenging Islamism, and
now this time they are seeing the journalists as a threat.
The goal of the Islamists is to create the fear and scare among a
specific group of people they see as threat at any time. At the time
of Kasravi, it was the scholars. At the time of Razmara, it was the
military officers. At the time of Rushdie, it was the authors of
fiction and at
the time of Forouhars, it was the politicians and as far as the
Mokhtari, it was the writers.
Now let's take a look at the case of Zahra Kazemi. We all know about
Steven Emerson who even lives in the U.S. and how the Western
journalists like him have been viewed by the Islamists as the enemy
for some time, and that is the view of Islamists of the press and
the foreign press in Iran now. Actually many Iranian and dual
national journalists and professional correspondents have recently
been working *inside* Iran for different Western papers and radios,
and this murder is the Islamists' message to them. IRI is a state
Islamism. The forces that collect money to hire a hit man to kill
Salman Rushdie were freely acting inside IRI, with open
semi-official status in different state organs, while IRI diplomats
were saying that IRI will not do anything to execute Khomeini's
fatwa to kill Rushdie.
Bottom line the world still does not understand the Islamist fatwa
killings, which have been known to the Middle East secular freedom
fighters for a long time, before even the birth of Islamic Republic
of Iran or Taliban. And even in secular Turkey, a top satirist Aziz
Nesin was almost killed by Islamists two years before he passed away, and that was
long before the current Islamic party comes to power in Turkey, and
it was the Islamists' attempt to intimidate the secular forces in
Turkey. The fatwa killing of Ayatollah Khoi in Iraq happened just a
few months ago and as usual nobody knows which Ayatollah had issued
the order and the Islamist reformists are as usual silent about it.
United Nations has not done anything to legally put a stop to this
vicious Islamic rule, which still lingers on in the 21st Century,
and the Islamists believe in taghieh, which means that they lie even
under oath, when they think their action is helping Islam. So all
these IRI so-called efforts to find the killers of Forouhars in the
last three years, and their investigations to find the killers of
Zahra Kazemi now are a facade.
If the world had woken up when Ayatollah Khomeini gave the fatwa to
kill Salman Rushdie, we would not have seen more Islamist murders
like WTC and now Zahar Kazemi which are all fatwa killings. A few
months ago, I wrote that United Nations should take action on fatwa
killings, but have we seen UN do anything about it? How many more
should lose their lives to Islamist murders before we know fatwa
killing is real.
Behind all these IRI and Islamists' murders, there is a so-called
"spiritual" Ayatollah leader who issues the fatwa to kill. Most of
these killers are not any rogue elements in some obscure
organization in Iran's government, and they act by the fatwa orders.
They are the same ones who freed the Christian priests from prison
in Iran to murder them on the street decades ago, when many Iranian
Muslims were changing faith to Christianity in those early days of
IRI, long before the murder of Forouhars. Yes, Islamists, murder from
every group of society, when they see writers or scholars or
politicians or students or journalists are a threat to Islamism.
Decades after the death of Kasravi, still the name of the Ayatollah
who issued his murder fatwa is not published, although the Islamist
mafia from the first days of the murder gave the message that it
*was* their work. Maybe Ayatollah Khomeini's open fatwa to kill
Salman Rushdie helped the world to see beyond any doubt that
Ayatollahs actually *do* make these fatwa kill orders, and it is not
just rumors about them, when taghieh of their diplomats hides this
from public, the heinous reality of Islamism and Islamic theocracy.
As I have written before, I hope United Nations to take the lead to
legally pursue Islamists and IRI, to disclose the names of the
Ayatollahs who are responsible for all the unsettled Islamist
murders, and to bring those Ayatollahs to trial in courts of crimes
against humanity. That includes the recent murders of Ayatollah Khoi
who himself was an Ayatollah and the murder of Foruhars, the writers
and now the journalist Zahra Kazemi.
Hoping for a democratic and secular
futurist republic in
Iran,
July 31, 2003
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