"This is a free country. Everyone may speak up here, and students are no exception. However, statesmen proceed from national interests, above all, in their decision-making," he emphasized. The Revolutionary Guard Corps is determined to keep foreign legations safe, warned the diplomat as he called on the public to be tolerant and reckon with ambassadorial immunity.
Last week's riotous demonstrators demanded coalition withdrawal from Iraq, and protested against US soldiers' conduct in Al-Najaf and Karbala, which they consider insulting Islam. A majority of Iranians are Shi'a Muslims, while the two Iraqi towns of dramatic fate are among the foremost Shi'ite shrines. Al-Najaf has the sepulcher of Ali, the first of Imams, and Karbala, of Hussein, Ali's son by Fatima daughter of the Prophet.
The demonstrators demanded the British ambassador expelled from Iran as they were throwing stones at the embassy and hurling firecrackers at the premises. British flags were burned near the embassy.
Iran and the UK restored diplomatic relations quite recently, and to give them up after all trials and tribulations is the last thing Iran wants to do, whatever the radical public may want. Britain was the last of major European countries to revive those relations, severed after the Islamic revolution of 1979.
The notorious Rushdie case has been shelved in an impressive tolerant move. Iran found blasphemous The Satanic Verses, sensational novel by Salman Rushdie, British writer of Indian extraction. Ayatollah Khomeini called on pious Moslems to kill him. The author was forced into hiding, 1989. Now, Iran no longer insists on Rushdie killed. Though its authorities are in no power to revoke the death sentence, they no longer insist on it, was a recent official statement made in Tehran.
