On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini went on Radio Tehran to issue a public death warrant for the Indian-born novelist and British citizen Salman Rushdie. The warrant was in the form of a fatwa, an Islamic religious ruling or scholarly decree pertaining to Islamic law, issued by a recognized authority. Khomeini decreed that Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses was a “blasphemy against Islam” for its portrayal of the prophet Muhammad, not to mention an uncomplimentary character who was a thinly veiled version of Khomeini himself. The fatwa was accompanied by a $2,000,000 bounty on Rushdie’s life. It was not an idle threat.
Rushdie was immediately put under police protection, and on March 7th Great Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. Great Britain did not restore relations for nearly a decade. On August 3, 1989, a would be assassin named Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh blew up himself, as well as two floors of the Paddington Hotel in London, when he accidentally detonated the book-bomb he was making for Rushdie. He has a martyr’s shrine in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. On July 11, 1991, the book’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi 
Igarashi, was stabbed to death. Later that month the Italian language translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed and seriously injured. The Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, narrowly escaped an attempted assassination in 1993. And on July 2nd of that year, an angry mob surrounded a hotel in Sivas, Turkey where Aziz Nesin, the Turkish language translator, was attending a conference celebrating a 16th century poet; learning of his presence, the mob set fire to the hotel. Thirty-seven people died. Nesin escaped the fire, though he was set upon by firemen and seriously beaten.
Now, some of the same people and publications who have decried the fatwa as barbaric, and who have defended Rushdie in the name of democracy, tolerance, and freedom, are calling for the murder of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The U.S. State Department documents stirring the present controversy were stolen by Army Private Bradley Manning, not Julian Assange. WikiLeaks received the documents but has
publicly released only a few hundred of them, instead making the full quarter-million available to five of the world’s leading newspapers: The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and Le Monde. Those papers have not published them either, instead merely summarizing, selectively quoting, and taking care to redact information and withhold materials that could jeopardize individuals or reveal serious state secrets, as opposed to the uncomfortable and embarrassing ones we’ve heard so much about. No matter. Because he runs the organization serving as the go-between from Manning to the five newspapers, there are people publicly and forcefully calling for Assange to be murdered.
On November 30th, University of Calgary Professor Tom Flanagan, a former Chief of Staff to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said on the CBC News Network: “I think Assange should be assassinated.” Stateside, Jeffrey T. Kuhner, president of the Edmund Burke Institute, has called for Assange’s assassination in the Washington Times. Kuhner labels him an “enemy combatant,” and asserts that “Mr. Assange is an anti-American radical.” On Facebook, Sarah Palin also called Assange anti-American and said he should be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” Mark Whittington of 
AssociatedContent.com has defended Palin’s comment saying that she “probably” did not mean to suggest Assange be assassinated, but that would be the “right” thing to do, and at the very least he should “disappear suddenly and wake up in one of those CIA-run rendition prisons” where he could “be drained dry of information” and then transferred to Guantanamo. William Kristol of the Weekly Standard echoed that sentiment in a piece called “Whack WikiLeaks” in which he called upon the U.S. government to “snatch or neutralize Julian Assange.” Bill O’Reilly seems to respect the rule of law enough to merely advocate for Assange’s trial and execution, though he openly applauds the notion of an unmanned drone taking him out. Writing in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer mused that instead of actually being assassinated, Assange should be subjected to the psychological torment of eternally fearing it.
Meanwhile, President Obama seems to be continuing his predecessor’s practice of maintaining a hit list of worthy assassination targets. While this might seem logical within 
the context of war, it’s also a very slippery slope. For example, the Obama administration has authorized the killing of a native born American citizen accused of plotting violent attacks against he U.S. What’s more, last week U.S. District Court Judge John Bates shot down a lawsuit protesting that proposed assassination. In so doing, Bates indirectly gave judicial sanction for the federal government to kill an American citizen. The United States, as it turns out, is open for business when it comes to assassination.
In other words, we cannot dismiss the cries to kill Assange as mere over-the-top posturing by media hogs. It is not enough to point out, for example, that Kuhner has made absolutely ludicrous assertions, claiming Assange is a “lone 
hacker” who “wants to see the United States defeated by its Islamic fascist enemies.” Honestly, what’s more ridiculous? The notion that Assange is a “lone hacker” working on behalf of radical, violent Islamic fundamentalists, or that the President of the Edmund Burke Institute can’t seem to tell the difference between fascism and fundamentalist Islamic theocracy? Either way, revealing factual inaccuracies and preposterous interpretations is a good start, but more direct opposition is needed.
This is a very real and serious issue. There are well-known Americans and Canadians, in and out of government, issuing and calling for American-style fatwas to assassinate a man whose organization received stolen State Department documents. Those calls have consequences. Very important and influential people want to murder Julian Assange, and perhaps millions 
of Americans agree. Over 1,600 people have recommended Kuhner’s article via Facebook. And as Topix.com queries readers about how much money they will spend this holiday season, it’s also running a poll on whether Assange should be killed, “only neutralized,” or left alone. At last check, half the respondents wanted him killed or neutralized. Whether it is in the form of a lone gunman, an organized hit squad, or a roiled mob, there is the potential for the murderous pleas of politicians and the intelligentsia to come to fruition, either directly or indirectly.
Two days after his initial call for execution, Tom Flanagan went back on television to apologize and recant, saying he “never seriously intended to advocate or propose the assassination of Mr. Assange.” His retraction, while most welcome, hopefully says less about the rebirth of Mr. Flanagan’s commitment to Western values and respect for law than it does about the society in which he lives. That is, I’m less concerned with Flanagan’s personal remorse than I am with the pressure that has rightly been brought to bear on him: the notion that the United States and Canada are nations of laws and proponents of freedom, and that we do not shoot people in the head, slit their throats, blow them up, 
kidnap them, or imprison and torture them because we vociferously and angrily disagree with their decision to publish materials that have embarrassed us.
That same pressure needs to be brought to bear on Palin, Kristol, and the like. For as embarrassing as some of the revelations have been, thus far there is nothing in any of those State Department cables that sullies the reputation of the United States anywhere near as much as the murderous incantations of American politicians and intellectuals.