While political killings were the hallmark of Iran’s Islamic Revolution from its inception, in 1988 Iran’s religious rulers having determined that more comprehensive measures were needed, initiated a campaign of mass extermination of Iranian Leftist dissidents, arresting, torturing, and executing thousands of Iranians in an accelerated, state sponsored killing spree that went on for months, with virtually no international outcry or protest.
For as many as 30,000 Leftist Iranians, a gruesome execution accompanied a failure to correctly respond to a simple inquiry as to one’s fidelity to Islamic doctrine that required an explicit rejection of Marxist political theory. The religious inquisition included these and other questions as Ervand Abrahamian detailed in Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran:
- ‘Are you a Muslim?’
- ‘Do you believe in God?’
- ‘Is the Holy Koran the Word of God?’
- ‘Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?’
- ‘Will you publicly recant historical materialism?’
- ‘Do you accept the Holy Muhammad to be the Seal of the Prophets?’
- ‘Will you denounce your former beliefs before the cameras?‘
- Do you fast during Ramadan?’
- ‘Do you pray and read the Holy Koran?’
- ‘Would you rather share a cell with a Muslim or a non-Muslim?’
- ‘Will you sign an affidavit that you believe in God, the Prophet, the Holy Koran, and the Resurrection?’
The western media, the United States, the United Nations, and, most alarmingly, Leftist commentators, activists, academics, and publications in the west were largely silent, if not wholly indifferent to this harrowing program of torture and mass murder perpetrated by Iran’s clerical fascists who, having successfully used the Marxists to seize power in the 1979 Iranian “Revolution”, quickly went on to permanently eradicate them.
In painstaking detail, British barrister Geoffrey Robertson Q.C. in The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran, 1988, Report Of An Inquiry describes this utterly macabre, religiously sanctioned program of mass extermination.
Published in April of 2011, Robertson writes that leftist political prisoners in Iran,
…were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of six from ropes hanging from the front of the stage in an assembly hall; some were taken to army barracks at night, directed to make their wills and then shot by firing squad. Their bodies were doused with disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks and buried by night in mass graves. Months later their families, desperate for information about their children or their partners, would be handed a plastic bag with their few possessions. They would be refused any information about the location of the graves and ordered never to mourn them in public. By mid-August 1988, thousands of prisoners had been killed in this manner by the state – without trial, without appeal and utterly without mercy.
The regime did not stop at this extermination of Mojahedin supporters. The killings were suspended for a fortnight’s religious holiday, but began again when the “Death Committee” (as prisoners would later call the delegation) summoned members of other left-wing groups whose ideology was regarded as incompatible with the theocratic state constructed by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution. These groups included the communist Tudeh party, aligned with Moscow, the Marxist/Leninist Fadaiyan Khalq (which had split into majority and minority factions), Peykar (orthodox Marxist/Leninist), Trotskyites, Maoists, and any remaining liberals who had supported the Republic’s first short-lived president, Bani-Sadr. Their interviews were longer, trickier and the chance of survival (albeit in most cases after torture) somewhat higher. This time the issue was not their political affiliation, but their religion and their willingness to follow the state’s version of Islam: in short, whether they were apostates. […]
The beatings inflicted on leftist women and on other men who were regarded as capable of religious compliance satisfied the definition of torture, which is absolutely prohibited even if it is consonant with national law. The beatings by electric cable on the soles of the feet, five times a day for weeks on end, together in many cases with beatings on the body, were calculated to and did cause excruciating pain and extensive suffering as well as humiliation and degradation. The mental anguish was heightened by the fact that the beatings were inflicted not for the purpose of punishment, but to make the prisoners adopt a religion that they had rejected, and thus surrender their freedom of conscience. Again, no defence of necessity can possibly arise: the only object of the beatings was to break their will and their spirit and to make them more amenable to the state’s version of Islamic governance.
Given this history, it’s unlikely that the sacrifice of a few thousand Bosnian “Muslim” miscreants with a taste for beer, and a possible Partisan pedigree would have mattered much, if at all, to Tehran’s religious junta. By the Islamic Revolutionary standards set forth, their unholy habits had surely rendered them apostates anyway—group as reviled as the Communists by Iran’s psychotic killer clerics; in Iran, apostasy remains a crime punishable by death.
No doubt, the case could be made that such fallen Muslims would better serve the cause dead than alive.
Which, as it turned out, happened to be true.
Once brought to fruition, Clinton’s proposal to Izetbegovic would firmly, if erroneously, establish Muslims as the most persecuted victims the world over, helpfully belying countless episodes of Muslim on Muslim atrocities and mass murder such as that perpetrated by Iran’s spiritual leaders against its own citizenry with the terrifying skill and zeal of the German Gestapo—itself following on the heels of another mammoth Muslim on Muslim blood bath: the Iran-Iraq war, a war in which the Iranian Mullahs sent children, Iranian children, to clear minefields—and to their deaths.
Perhaps that’s what earned Iran’s government the ringing endorsement of retired Major General Otto Remer that same year, particularly now that Iran—like Germany— was playing a crucial, if covert role in helping destroy the Third Reich’s old wartime adversaries: the 
Yugoslav Partisans and the Serbs whose guerrilla tactics had so bedeviled the Nazi war machine.
But than, what Nazi could not but be enamored by a regime even more vehemently committed to the denial of the German genocide against the Jews than the fatherland itself.
Adara Press 