As Nov. 29, the day of restarting the Vienna talks to ostensibly revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, draws nigh, apologists and sympathizers in the West have augmented their efforts to push through the agenda of the Islamist regime of Iran.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
A peculiar argument that the regime's well-placed agents of influence, such as those in left-leaning think tanks and academia, constantly feed to the public, and the sympathetic mainstream media repeatedly promote to push the White House to lower its guard and embrace a deal with the mullahs at any cost, is that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa – a religious decree – that forbids any military use of nuclear technology.
Based on that claim, these apologists insist that the Iranian regime has no intention of making nuclear bombs to menace the world and that it only wants to make "peaceful" use of nuclear technology to produce energy and improve its medical sector.
The crucial question raised here is that, can this alleged fatwa be so absolutely binding to insure the world of the peacefulness of the regime's highly suspect nuclear activities? In order to know the answer to that question, we need to make a foray into Shiite jurisprudence and become familiar with the true nature of a fatwa.
According to Shiite jurisprudence, a fatwa constitutes informing the community of believers of the divine will on general issues of faith. After comprehensive contemplation and investigation into the premises of and reasons for an issue of faith, a jurisprudent comes to a conclusion about the divine will with respect to that issue, and then declares it as a fatwa to the public.
However, a fatwa is not absolute. It is predicated on a huge number of variables, most important of all in the context of the theocratic state of the Islamic Republic, political expediency.
In December 1987, in a signal epistle to Ali Khamenei, then President of the Islamic republic, the founder of the revolution Ayatollah Khomeini formulated this principle which since has become known as the "Charter of the Guardianship of the Jurist."
According to this charter, the expediency and survival of the Islamist political system is prioritized over such basic articles of faith as prayer, fast, and hadj (pilgrimage to Mecca). In other words, the Supreme Jurist, who is the same as the Supreme Leader, can overrule and ignore all the tenets of faith to insure the survival of the Islamist system.
Khomeni's articulation of the principle, with which the whole existence of the Islamic Republic reverberates, has been most notoriously encapsulated in his sentence: "Upholding of the system [Islamic republic] is the most essential of the essentials."
Beyond the relativity inherent in any fatwa that casts a long shadow over the claim that it is perpetually binding, ambiguities increase and doubts arise when we realize that in fact no such fatwa exists at all.
During the Obama administration, regime apologists in the West used to heatedly argue that Khamenei's fatwa had already been officially registered at the United Nations. They still occasionally do so under the Biden administration. But this is just a publicity stunt, and no such fatwa has ever been registered at the UN.
The Islamic republic is one of the most prolific producers of all sorts of weapons of mass destruction, including drones and ballistic missiles. And it has openly and frequently used them against the United States (Ayn al Asad in Iraq and Al-Tanf in Syria), Israel (through proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza), Saudi Arabia (Aramco facilities), and the United Arab Emirates. There is no reason to believe that the regime will stop at anything to enhance that edge by acquiring military-grade nuclear technology.
The apocalyptic regime of Iran is hellbent on going nuclear, and all the measures to prove otherwise, including participating in protracted talks with the West, are only diversionary tactics to buy time. Once that aim is achieved, the fraudulent fatwa will have fulfilled its expedient purpose. As Khomeini once famously said, "the upholding of the system is the most essential of the essentials."
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
