The Cutting Edge

State-controlled Iranian media like Day News are calling upon the international Muslim community to murder Shahin Najafi, an Iranian singer living in Cologne, the online news agency Shia online even put a bounty of $ 100,000 on his head. The media referred to a death fatwa, issued by the Iranian Grand Ayatollah Safi Golpayegani in April. The decree demands that not only Shiites, but also other Muslims kill the convict. The death fatwa proves that the Iranian regime tries to enforce the Islamic law internationally. The German Federal government has not commented publicly on the case, German authorities have instead suggested that the singer who is living in Cologne should leave Germany. The silence of government officials is a scandal. Berlin must condemn the death-fatwa unequivocally and publicly. It is absolutely unacceptable that German authorities suggest that a critic of the Iranian dictatorship should leave the Federal Republic. The German Federal government should follow the example of Great Britain and expel all Iranian diplomats in order to protect Shahin Najafi and other critics of the regime. The murder of three Kurdish opposition leaders and an interpreter in September 1992 in Berlin's Mykonos restaurant proved that the Iranian regime does not hesitate in murdering its critics in Germany. A incomplete list of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre shows that the regime has murdered at least 162 Iranians critical of the government abroad. The Iranian embassies have repeatedly served as the nerve centers of terror. Grand Ayatollah Safi Golpayegani, who has pronounced the death fatwa, is a confidant of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This suggests that this call to murder Najafi was made with the consent of the regime. This fatwa therefore has to be taken as seriously as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, or the fatwa against the Azerbaijani journalist Rafiq Tagi, who was murdered in 2011, following a death fatwa by Iranian Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani.

When Ayatollah Khomeini demanded the murder of British author Salman Rushdie the German parliament rightly declared that this fatwa was "a declaration of war against our laws and values ​​system, as well as against the universal principles of the Charter of the United Nations". This assessment is also true for the order to murder Shahin Najafi. With its silence the Federal Government is suggesting that it will accept this 'declaration of war against our laws and value systems', in order not to burden the forthcoming nuclear talks in Baghdad. In this way the government is encouraging the captors of the regime. The federal government must not give in to Islamist terror neither in the nuclear weapons issue, nor with respect to its duty to protect Iranians living here in exile." We demand the closure of diplomatic missions of the Iranian regime but also an immediate ban of Hezbollah, because the Islamist organization serves as a henchman to the Iranian regime.

Michael Spaney represents STOP the BOMB in Germany.