by Oui
Tue Jul 1st, 2025 at 10:45:26 AM EST
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Trump threatens to kill Iran's leader Ali Khamenei and demands 'unconditional surrender' | BBC News - 18 June 2025 |
Iranian scholar calls for action on Trump's, 'Zionist leaders' threats against Khamenei | JPost |
If they carry out such an act, they will face severe and divine punishment, and they will undoubtedly be avenged," Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi wrote.
Iranian religious leader Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi was asked a question about how Muslims should respond to US President Trump and "leaders of the Zionist regime" issuing "repeated threats" against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Shia scholars.
In response, Shirazi ruled that "It is clear that threatening the life of any person who is a pillar of the Islamic system, the Marja'iyyat (religious authority), and leadership, especially the supreme leader, is forbidden and religiously prohibited."
"It is obligatory to defend them and to confront the perpetrators of such threats, and violating this sanctity is one of the greatest sins," Shirazi wrote.
Assassinations of a leader of a sovereign nation had been forbidden by U.S. Congress, and I presume it's an illegal act by US law.
Assassinating Sovereigns and American Foreign Policy | Duke Law School - August 2020 |
International state-systems are defined by the sovereign independence of each state and therefore do not permit the targeting of sovereign leaders by fellow member states. Assassinating sovereign leaders has been considered so potentially corrosive of international society that its prohibition has been a foundational pillar of world order since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The New York Convention (1973) criminalises the assassination or any harm of "internationally protected persons". Practical and moral reasons have buttressed the prohibition against assassination around notions of stability and maintenance of international order. Data from Archigos indicates that the prohibition on targeting sovereign leaders has been so robust that only ten leaders have been assassinated by a foreign state between 1875 and 2004 (Goemans, Gleditsch, and Chiozza 2009, 269-83).
Yet this norm has been openly challenged by the US in its strikes on Saddam Hussein (2003) and Muammar Qaddafi (2011). What can help explain this erosion of liberal norms and principles of liberal international order by self-professed liberal hegemon?
The US has a long, chequered relationship with assassination. The myths of 1776 recount of a nation born through resistance to the tyranny that it holds at the core of its identity. Values legitimizing tyrannicide can be imputed from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. The US has followed the international prohibition against assassination beginning with the Lieber Code (1863), and General Order No. 100 that declared assassination "a relapse into barbarism."
Despite this, the use of assassination in American covert operations has been extremely high and many have argued that the US should be exempt from such prohibitions in times of war, and, as against foreign forms of tyranny. The Church Committee (1975) affirmed this position, asserting that while assassination was contrary to American values "we should not today rule out support for dissident groups seeking to overthrow tyrants..." (emphasis added 1975, 258). The use of assassination was banned by President Ford at this time in the first of a series of Executive Orders that were adopted and modified by all successive presidents. Yet with the War on Terror, the War Powers Resolution, Hughes-Ryan Amendment and the Intelligence Oversight Act, reveal the US maintains a substantial capacity for covert acts of assassination.
The US strikes on Hussein in 2003 were the first open strikes made by one state to target and kill another sovereign. Similar open strikes were made by NATO on Qaddafi during the Libya Intervention in 2011. The alleged conspiracy between terrorist groups and Hussein were used to justify these first assassination attempts. For Qaddafi, it was the assumption of imminent genocide.
Alongside the "strategic benefits" [placed in quotes by me - Oui] of targeting both leaders, it was the moral arguments observed in the rhetoric of both Presidents Bush and Obama that highlight powerful reasons behind the US willfully breaching an international prohibition of such importance as assassination.
The language President Bush used to justify the strikes were carefully crafted to appeal to American morality: combining a just war against tyranny, promoting human rights, extending democracy, and the assumption of American values as universal goods (Bush Jnr 2003). Importantly, it was only when the WMD failed to materialize that the moral rhetoric of fighting tyranny and promoting freedom begins to be ramped up by the Bush Administration over the security threats or purported links to al Qaeda. Similar moral justifications arose when the US targeted Qaddafi. The rhetoric of `freedom versus tyranny' was a stronger theme from the start, given the UNSC mandate was in preventing imminent genocide. [R2P principle used for regime change people, not saving humanity or halting genocide, see Gaza and today's horror ... sliding into barbarity - Oui]
President Obama was clear "The goal [of the intervention] is to make sure that the Libyan people can make a determination about how they want to proceed, and that they'll be finally free of 40 years of tyranny..." Afterward, Obama praised the death of Qaddafi in moral terms, as something that had removed the "dark shadow of tyranny" and "opening up a democratic era for Libya" (quoted in Louw-Vaudran 2013). Nevertheless, Obama would later lament what took place in Libya after Qaddafi's death was the "biggest mistake" of his presidency. The return of slavery to this country has lampooned any notion of a `humanitarian' cause behind the intervention.
In both cases, assassination was recast by the US as a legitimate tool of liberal power, a moral obligation, something intrinsic for transitioning a state from dictatorship to democracy, from incivility to civilization.
I've heard Obama's line before .... Barbarism and atrocities in SE Asia Vietnam War ... RAND scholar and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
From the Quiet Mutiny | 6 Aug. 2017 |
Repressive regimes are tyrannic ... lessons not learned from history.
British PM Starmer Drowning in His Cesspool
🔥🔥🔥
Palestine Action a terror deed ... when you lost the argument, dictatorship is the show of ultimate weakness in leadership.
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UK moves to ban Palestine Action under 'antiterrorism' laws, sparking protest rights fears | Al Jazeera |
We have laws to deal with crimes linked to protest. What this is really about is a government complicit in the Gaza atrocities seeking to silence dissent
Strongly worded emails are not doing it. Appeals to MPs are not doing it. Taking to the streets in our hundreds of thousands with banners and placards is not working. Elected representatives from every party in parliament have stood in the Commons and asked the government to act. Some government ministers themselves have condemned Israel's starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Every poll of public opinion shows that the nation demands we stop arming Israel, and wants to see an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire. But none of these things are working.
Keir Starmer and his cabinet remain impervious to all calls for humanitarian intervention, and Israel is still killing children in Gaza with the support of the British government.
To proscribe as "terrorist" a non-violent direct action group such as Palestine Action threatens the fundamental rights of freedom of expression, and of peaceful protest. Surely the government should only ever apply the Terrorism Act with the utmost restraint and precision. Otherwise it allows the state to repress civil liberties that have been dearly fought for and won, and which represent the bedrock of our democracy.
Those civil liberties have already come under real and dangerous threat. The powers given to the police have incrementally increased to an alarming degree, owing in part to the Terrorism Act of 2000 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022. These have both led to the right of public protest being seriously eroded, and afforded the police much greater powers and significantly less accountability. We have for some time seen these powers being used to suppress lawful protest and to detain peaceful protesters.
