Tentacles of the Rushdie Affair : Iran’s threat against novelist bars it from the world community

Revived hopes for a release of Western hostages held in Lebanon rest on the premise that Iran, whose influence there is great, wants to normalize its relations with the world community. But no normalization should take place if the precedent is allowed to stand that Iran may with impunity threaten a citizen of a Western democracy on the soil of his own country.

Britain’s prime minister, John Major, and his foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, have remained silent on Iran’s still unrescinded death sentence against British novelist Salman Rushdie. PEN American Center, the international organization of writers, recently urged them in a letter to break that silence: “A clear and public statement from you that a formal rescinding of the fatwa (death decree) is, as ever, a precondition of any renewal of diplomatic relations is the only principled response . . . and the only response that is likely to have any chance of real effect.”

The Rushdie affair touches the United States, too, and not just because Rushdie’s wife is American and because his U.S. publisher has also been threatened. This nation, and especially Southern California, is home to a large emigre Iranian and Iranian-American community. This death decree has been every expatriate Iranian’s worst nightmare come true, for the truth is that the decree is far from unprecedented: An Iranian tradition of religiously sanctioned assassination has claimed more than one victim in recent decades. Hitherto, that tradition has been confined to Iran. Will it remain so confined?

In June, the Washington Post reported that an Iranian hit squad had arrived in Britain to kill Rushdie. If the squad succeeds, then Iran will have accomplished what Alvin Toffler has called “the globalization of censorship.”

Britain, to its credit, has maintained Rushdie’s bodyguard. And yet, there are those who fear for the long term because, to many of the English, the Indian-born Rushdie seems foreign despite his citizenship; and the whole affair seems a Muslim quarrel that Britain needn’t have been drawn into. A timely word of solidarity from Secretary of State James A. Baker III, if not from President Bush, would honor Britain’s perseverance and serve notice to the world that the United States regards this as indeed a world problem.