HOAX: ‘Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei Has Issued a Fatwa Against the Development of Nuclear Weapons’

Posted: March 22, 2015 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Diplomacy, War Room, White House | Tags: Ali Khamenei, Andrew McCarthy, Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, Barack Obama, Christian, Iran, Islam, John Kerry, Middle East Media Research Institute, United States |Leave a comment

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Why the Phantom Fatwa?

I wrote about President Obama’s March 19 statement on the Persian new yearin “Our Supreme Leader is a Supreme Fool.” In the statement Obama asserted: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon.”

It Doesn’t Exist

Obama’s assertion follows closely on Secretary of State Kerry’s assertion to the same effect. I quoted Kerry’s citation of the fatwa in “Of fatuity and fatwas.”

The fatwa, however, doesn’t exist. It has never been seen. As Andrew McCarthy explains, the fatwa is a patent hoax. Andy writes (emphasis in original): “The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has done extensive research into compilations of Khamenei’s published fatwas…No such fatwa has ever been published.” Andy links to MEMRI’s two 2013 posts in search of the fatwa in the omitted sentence.

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In a post at the Weekly Standard, Tom Joscelyn now simply asks of these gentlemen to whom the protection of our national security has been entrusted: “Produce the fatwa.” This is a perfectly reasonable request.

We heard the incessant yammering of the left about President Bush’s scrupulously accurate “16 words” in the 2003 State of the Union Address. The deal the Obama administration is about to produce with the Islamic Republic is enormously consequential. Obama and Kerry would have us believe that the fatwa they cite carries some significant weight in their case, otherwise why the repeated references to it? Yet it doesn’t exist.

The existence of the fatwa has been in issue ever since it was cited by President Obama in his 2013 United Nations address. As Joscelyn notes, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler went looking for the fatwa in 2013 and couldn’t find it. No surprise there. It doesn’t exist…(read more)

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