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Friday
May 11, 2001

Did Tel Aviv pay Salman Rushdie, too?

In his thinly veiled apologia for the Islamic Republic's murderous villainy ["Ghost of Khobar"], John Mohammadi would like to have us believe that a vast Zionist conspiracy plotted the Khobar Towers bombing in order to discredit and malign Iran's clerical regime. The main objective of this conspiracy, we are told, is to forestall the warming up of relations between Iran and its main adversary, the United States, as well as its neighbor, Saudi Arabia.

I've come across countless conspiracy theories in my life, but the crackpot quotient of this one is the most breathtaking. Does the author believe that Israel was also behind the systematic elimination of Iranian dissidents in France and Germany as a way of setting back Iran's relations with the European Union? Perhaps Tel Aviv also paid Salman Rushdie to write Satanic Verses in order to snarl Great Britain's relations with the Islamic Republic for more than a decade. You may want to look into that one, Mr. Mohammadi.

Mr. Mohammadi argues "assuming that the Iranians really are so hell-bent on killing Americans and driving them out of the Persian Gulf, they are smart enough to know that blowing up a building in Saudi Arabia only invite military retaliation and international condemnation, worsen Saudi ill-will and fears of Iran at the same time that Iran was trying to patch things up with its neighbors..."

That would make sense as long as you're dealing with a rational government. A quick look at the Islamic Republic's record in foreign and economic policy for the past 22 years would indicate to any dispassionate observer that the ordinary calculations of national interests have never prevailed in the mind of Iran's clerical rulers.

After all, this is a regime that has publicly admitted that it's own security agents were involved in murdering some of the country's best and brightest literary figures in cold blood (unless Mr. Mohammadi believes that these were "rogue agents" also on Mossad's payroll). Why would they then have any qualms about taking American lives on a foreign land?

It seems that Mr. Mohammadi did not even bother to read the New Yorker piece on the bombing that he is trying to rebut. If he had read the article carefully before launching his conspiracy diatribe, he would have learned that a cell member picked up by Saudi law-enforcement officers claimed that "he had met directly with Ahmad Sherifi, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard official who had selected the Khobar barracks as a target, and that Sherifi always announced that he was acting at the behest of Ayatollah Khamenei."

In another passage of this article, we learn that "Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah met in Pakistan with the outgoing Iranian President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, and brought up the Khobar bombing. 'We know you did it,' Abdullah told Rafsanjani, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation. Rafsanjani, in this account, insisted that he was not involved personally, but that if any Iranian had a role 'it was he'--Ayatollah Khamenei, the country's supreme leader-- and pointed upward."

Oh, yes, we know, the person who reported this conversation between the Saudi prince and Rafsanjani is also part of this Zionist conspiracy.

Hooman Bakhtiar

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