Last Monday, the European Union put forward what it described as the “final” proposed text of a revived nuclear deal with Iran, a deal which has been under negotiation in Vienna since the arrival of Joe Biden in the Oval Office. On Friday morning, the Iranian state news agency reported that the EU’s proposed text “can be acceptable if it provides assurances” to Tehran over its key demands, quoting a senior Iranian diplomat.
The timing could hardly have been more instructive. Within hours of that report, Sir Salman Rushdie had been brutally attacked by a knife-wielding assailant.
As I write, the motive for the attack has not been confirmed. What needs no confirming, however – because it has been Rushdie’s reality since 1989 – is that the former supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa stating the author and his publishers “are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.”
This is the Iran with which the US, France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China signed a nuclear deal in 2015, and with which they are attempting to revive that deal now in Vienna.