Assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, act of ethnic & religious barbarism

Tehran (Qodsna)- A former UN human rights rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories and prominent analyst of international laws in Princeton University, Professor Richard Falk wrote an exclusive article tilled “Assassinating: An Assault on Reverence, Legality, Diplomacy, and Reason”.  

Here is the full text of article:

To initiate the Iran War on February 28 of this year by deliberately assassinating the ‘Supreme Leader’ of the Islamic Republic of Iran was not only an extreme international crime but a monumental tactical blunder by the aggressor states that will be long reviled. The massive turnout of the Iranian people for this extraordinary funeral procession of the casket of this widely revered public figure, walking solemnly through Iran and neighboring countries in the region where Shi’a traditions prevail. Although belatedly, this display of reverential devotion is a humiliation for the West. a vital lesson. It should now be obvious to all but the most dogmatic Islamophobe that killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was an act of ethnic and religious barbarism as well as an assault on international law.

It turned out that the assassination was carried out by Israel, but the war against Iran was a joint effort with the United States, with the policy divergence between Washington and Tel Aviv only becoming apparent as it became clear to almost all that this was not the expected easy victory over a vulnerable adversary, but a strategic defeat of the militarily superior power additionally suffering a variety of adverse effects on Western interests in West Asia and beyond.

Although Trump’s diplomatic style of bluff, bluster, and boast contended in the early weeks of the war, that the assassination paved the way to an Iranian surrender that never happened behaviorally. Trump evidently at first fantasized on social media that the assassination brought about regime change in Iran that would was helpful in achieving the U.S. goals. Trump soon had to walk back this version of the impact of the murder of Iran’s Supreme Leader as delusionary propaganda that was not credible even in the United States. As is his practice Trump would not admit failure, and claimed the total destruction of Iran’s military capabilities as convincing evidence of a victorious U.S./Israeli war effort. These claims also soon became unsustainable even for Trump after Iran effectively retaliated by targeting U.S. military bases throughout the Gulf, including Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain with its supposedly destroyed missile capabilities. If this was not enough of an Iranian pushback, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping disrupted critical global supply chains for energy and fertilizers.

Trump kept back-pedaled without departing from his absurd Orwellian posture of calling a multidimensional defeat a total victory. Such bluster seemed rather strange in light of agreeing to high level negotiations over Israel’s objections to end the war. Trump’s priority again shifted to a preoccupation with what the unfavorable course of the Iran War was doing to his plummeting political standing within the United States, along with a thinly disguised anxiety about himself becoming a victim of regime change.

It might get closer to grasping the Iranian response to Ayatollah Khamenei assassination to consider how the United States would have reacted to a reverse scenario of an Iranian assassination out of the blue that not only killed a sitting American president but also as ‘collateral damage’ killed his infant grandchild, as the Tehran’s assassination did in relation to Ayatollah Khamenei’s 14-month grandchild named Zahra. The reaction would certainly not be one of accommodation or political surrender. Instead, it would give rise to an outpouring of patriotic passions calling for revenge and destruction of the state that sponsored such an assassination. That is, assassinating of even a dangerous and irresponsible secular leader with a record of disrespect for international law and the rejection of universally professed values would induce a more determined commitment to reassert sovereignty over territorial independence and exact revenge.

The West does not know much about Ayatollah Khamenei record as a leader or his direct influence on the particulars of Iranian domestic and foreign policy. Israeli and U.S. propaganda, infused with Islamophobia, made such a simplistic portrayal untrustworthy, and at best partial and irrelevant to embarking on an aggressive war in direct violation of the UN Charter. Any readjustment of state/society internal relation is a matter of domestic politics, and gives no grounds for intervention to set things right as the pro-monarchist remnant of the Iranian diaspora supports and plays into the hands of Islamophobic sentiments in the West.

We do know that for religious, and possibly practical reasons, Ayatollah Khamanei was opposed to Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, even in the face of Israel’s covertly acquired nuclear arsenal and repeated warmongering throughout the region, including Iran. For both Israel and the U.S. nuclear issues were put forward as the main pretext for initiating the war, although even this rationale was rendered suspicious as Oman-mediated negotiations were reported nearing a successful outcome when the aggressor states decided to strike. To attack while negotiations were underway subverts both diplomacy as an alternative to war and trust in conflict resolution upon which peaceful international relations depend.

For the Trump presidency or the Netanyahu leadership to claim a commitment to democratic accountability is phony propaganda given the record of the two governments. Here it was highlighted by Trump’s ridiculous call to the Iranian people ‘to take your country back’ in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, as if the killing of the Ayatollah Khamenei would be welcomed as a political gift to the Iranian nationalism. Among other misperceptions, such an idea supposes that Iranians had no recollection of the coup in 1953, facilitated by the CIA that restored the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Peacock Throne. And in the process overthrowing the democratically elected government of Mohamed Mosaddeq. For the next 26 years the U.S. government lived comfortably with the Shah’s repressive regime, which pleased foreign investment interests by privatizing Iran’s lucrative oil industry for the benefit of American energy giants.

It was not a slip of the pen that led Henry Kissinger to write in his diplomatic memoir that “the Shah was the rarest of things, an unconditional ally,” as evidenced by among other things, saving U.S. some embarrassment by supplying both apartheid South Africa and Israel with oil and gas. During the Shah’s period of rule, we never heard any Western leader call upon the Iranian people to take back their country despite the horrible human rights record of the government in Tehran. On the contrary, during the 1978 largely nonviolent revolutionary uprising that brought the Islamic Republic into being the U.S. despite the liberal presidency of Jimmy Carter did its utmost to keep the Shah in power, applauding the violent tactics of the regime against nonviolent protesters and going so as to send a NATO general to Tehran on a mission to explore prospects for a counterrevolutionary backlash, which failed as none were found.

There was a further occurrence on the infamous opening day barbarism of the assassination. It took the form of an attack on the Minab Girls School (Shajarah Terćeyelah Elementary School), killing at least 156, injuring 95, mostly girls and boys as despite the name girls were on one floor, boys on the floor above. To meet the outcry, the U.S. Government excused the incident as an unfortunate accident of war caused by its reliance on outdated targeting information. As of now, no apology has been forthcoming.

It recalls a somewhat similar incident in 1988 when the U.S. shot down an Iranian civilian airbus filled with civilian passengers including many children, all of whom were killed. Ironically the plane crashed into the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, thus being an ironic historical foretaste of Minab. On this occasion President George H.W. Bush also exhibited the worst side of American Exceptionalism by his unseemly response to the tragedy: “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”

The killing of the Supreme Leader and an attack on the Minab elementary school whether accidental or not, highlight perceptions of the Iran War around the world as an evil undertaking and as a geopolitical defeat of lasting, yet still uncertain, significance. We do yet know how to assess fully this dramatic rejection of a primary claim of humane behavior to the effect that civilian innocence of children and religious leaders are exempted from the deadly tactics of warfare. In this instance the brazen violation of these prohibitions were accentuated by sending such negative signals of intention at the unlawful commencement of hostilities.

Unless the West quickly learns the lessons of geopolitical humility the whole world faces a precarious future moving ever closer to global calamity, whether nuclear or ecological. And a beginning of such humility would be a show unconditional respect for foreign religious leaders serving as leaders of a nation experiencing decades of destabilizing hostility, mostly not of its making.