Boycott on Murder

The 12 members of the European Community have responded to Iran’s incitement to murder novelist Salman Rushdie by recalling their senior diplomats from Tehran, a step that dramatizes their concern for elementary standards of civility but stops short of providing an excuse for confrontation. This temperate action has been careful to keep options open. The European Community has made clear that it is ready to take more severe measures if need be--including probable economic sanctions--or, alternatively, that it is prepared to resume moves toward more normal relations if Iran sees fit to “declare its respect for international obligations.” Iran is eager to rebuild its ties to the West, and the West Europeans have been willing to cooperate. Now that cooperation stands suspended until Iran undertakes to stop threatening the lives of other countries’ citizens.

If a pragmatic bloc in fact exists in the higher levels of the Tehran regime, it will probably welcome the European Community’s action. The view that has lately emerged in the West is that the death sentence pronounced against Rushdie is not so much a reflection of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s religious outrage toward a fallen-away Muslim and alleged blasphemer as it is a political maneuver prompted by Iran’s own internal power struggles and its effort to regain some prestige in the larger Islamic world. That could be. At the same time, the intensity of Khomeini’s hatred for what Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” represents can hardly be underestimated. Tehran’s pragmatists may well try to argue now that passing a sentence of death on Rushdie was a practical mistake that has worked to set back the improvement in economic and political links with Europe that Iran sorely needs after its enormously costly war with Iraq. That is a reasoned argument. Whether it will prevail in the face of unflinching fanaticism is another matter.

In the meantime, an important section of the civilized world has shown that it is capable of a unified and concrete response when confronted with a chilling and grotesque threat to international norms. What the West European governments have said as a unit is much the same as what they said individually after American Embassy personnel were taken hostage in Tehran in 1979. Certain obligations govern the behavior of sovereign states, and regimes that ignore or show contempt for those obligations can’t expect to get away cost-free. What they also have said is that an Iran that wants to end its international isolation can no longer afford to indulge every peevish whim of its out-of-touch spiritual leader.