Amid the ongoing controversy about Iran’s nuclear program and what to do about it, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Foreign Minister and a hardline pro-regime newspaper have recently revived the old claim, much beloved of the Obama administration back in the bad old days, that there is nothing to be concerned about at all. This is because the Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, and therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran couldn’t possibly be trying to develop nuclear weapons. There’s just one catch: no such fatwa exists or has ever existed.
No less a luminary than Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi nevertheless recently said: “If America’s aim is for Iran not to advance toward nuclear weapons, this is achievable. We have no desire to build nuclear weapons. The Supreme Leader issued a fatwa, and we do not need nuclear weapons in our defense doctrine. They [the Americans] imposed sanctions on us due to the enrichment. We were under sanctions for years, but we didn’t turn to [nuclear] weapons. Our scientists were assassinated, but we didn’t turn to [nuclear] weapons. We came, we negotiated, and we reached an agreement through negotiations, but they [the U.S.] abandoned [the agreement]. We didn’t use [nuclear] weapons. Our policy is based on principles and foundations, and nuclear weapons have no place in our defense doctrine.”
This followed the pro-regime newspaper Kayhan asserting that the governments of the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France “know very well that Iran has the technical know-how to acquire nuclear weapons, but that for religious and moral reasons it will never move towards producing nuclear weapons. Iran has repeatedly declared [this], and, more importantly, the Supreme Leader [Khamenei] has issued a religious fatwa banning the production and use of nuclear weapons. This fatwa is not a political tactic, but a legal and strategic position within the framework of the principles of Islam.”
The Obama administration went for this fatwa in a big way. Back in Aug. 2015, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said: “The Ayatollah has issued a fatwa… declaring no one should ever possess a nuclear weapon in Iran. We said, let’s take the fatwa and codify it into the agreement,” that is, Obama’s notoriously ill-conceived nuclear deal. Obama himself said in Sept. 2013: “I do believe that there is a basis for a resolution” of the nuclear disputes with Iran, because “Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.”
Even before that, in April 2012, Kerry’s predecessor as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, showed herself to be a believer in the fatwa as well: “The other interesting development which you may have followed was the repetition by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that they would—that he had issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, against weapons of mass destruction.”
Khamenei had indeed spoken out against nuclear weapons. In Feb. 2012, he said that possessing a nuclear bomb “constitutes a major sin.” At an Aug. 2012 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, Khamenei reiterated, “Our motto is nuclear energy for all and nuclear weapons for none.”
Statements are one thing, however, and an official statement that nuclear weapons violate the teachings of Islam is quite another. The unfortunate fact is that the anti-nuke fatwa to which everyone kept referring did not actually exist. There is no such fatwa among official published collections of Khamenei’s fatwas, and its text is not available anywhere.
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In April 2012, researchers from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) attempted to locate the fatwa and instead discovered that “no such fatwa ever existed or was ever issued or published, and that media reports about it are nothing more than a propaganda ruse on the part of the Iranian regime apparatuses—in an attempt to deceive top U.S. administration officials and the others mentioned above."
MEMRI concluded that “Iranian regime officials’ presentation of statements on nuclear weapons attributed to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a fatwa, or religious edict, when no such fatwa existed or was issued by him, is a propaganda effort to propose to the West a religiously valid substitute for concrete guarantees of inspectors’ access to Iran's nuclear facilities. Since the West does not consider mere statements, by Khamenei or by other regime officials, to be credible, the Iranian regime has put forth a fraudulent fatwa that the West would be more inclined to trust.”
Yet this disinformation may not even have originated with the Iranian Islamic regime. Iranian political analyst Amir Taheri wrote in Sept. 2015 that the principal source for the existence of the fatwa was none other than Barack Obama: “Those who refer to the fatwa, including some mullahs, always credit Obama as the source of their information.”
That would certainly explain a great deal.
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