RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran’s mullah-dominated regime, even as it was damning the recent video on the Prophet Muhammad as an insult to the sanctity of Islam, has unleashed a ferocious attack on Christianity.Grand Ayatollah Vahid Khorasani, a prominent Shi’ite source of emulation and a Twelver, in condemning the insult to the Prophet, not only insulted Pope Benedict XVI but also Jesus and Miriam, stating that if it were not for the Quran, Jesus would not be worthy of God’s heavens.

Khorasani, in a long statement quoting several verses from the Quran published Friday in Hawzah News, the official site of the seminaries in Qom, Iran, claims the only reason Jesus is regarded as holy is due to the Quran and Muhammad.

“Hey, clueless pope who has chosen silence (on the Muhammad video), answer this: If there was no Quran, then as the Bible and the Torah have it, Jesus the son of Miriam is a bastard and a bastard will be forbidden from the heavens of God, and so the high place of Jesus is due to the existence of the Prophet Muhammad as the last prophet by God,” Khorasani said.

The grand ayatollah likened Muhammad to the sun that shines on humanity and cannot be diminished.

“The Prophet is the light of God and everlasting and that Allah, among all of His prophets, only compares himself to Muhammad and clearly calls him the last of His prophets with the most complete and righteous religion,” Khorasani said.

The Quran, the last book of God, removed the burden of “adultery” from Miriam and sanctified the birth of Jesus, Khorasani said. “The ignorant Christians burn the Quran and don’t understand that the result will be that Jesus becomes an illegitimate child.”

Khorasani had previously called the Bible wrong and unjust, a book that does not reflect the words of God but rather one that has been altered.

The U.N. General Assembly will again hear Muslim arguments this week over a proposed international law against blasphemy, this time spurred on by the Muhammad video. But such a law would also have to address Khorsani’s views.

See Khorasani’s statement below, or at this link.

A member of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution in Iran, Hassan Rahim Pour Azghodi, a noted ideologist and theorist of the Islamic regime, in a similar attack against Christianity on Thursday said, “The most corrupt individuals in (Christian) communities are their religious leaders and priests; however, in Islamic societies the most pure are the clerics.”

Azghodi praised the Islamic Awakening (Arab Spring) in the region, crediting the Islamic Republic of Iran for its success, and said Islam is the only expanding religion and that even Christians are converting to it.

“The Christian society today is the most corrupt with its behavior, and the West has the filthiest culture in the world, where savagery and voluptuousness are the two clear distinctions of it,” the ideologist said.

Azghodi, in an earlier speech on the Islamic regime’s State TV, had called for an international jihad to destroy the West.

Iranian clerics have been concerned about the spread of Christianity in Iran as tens of thousands have converted to it. Most Iranians resent the clerics and Islam, which have suppressed them since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Many have formed churches in their homes to spread the word of Christ, which Islamic officials call “the enemy’s efforts” to establish “house-churches.”

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not only ordered the burning of tens of thousands of confiscated Bibles, calling it an unholy book, but also ordered the Intelligence Ministry to clamp down on converts, according to a former Revolutionary Guards intelligence officer who has defected to a Scandinavian country.

“The Guards intelligence has assigned a unit in major cities across the country with the order to infiltrate (the Christian) groups, identifying pastors and the members, then make arrests, forcing them under torture to agree to appear on TV and confess to criminal activities in having connections to Israel and America,” the source said. “Lashing the bare feet of those arrested with cable wires is one method of torture used. Other tortures include spouses of the arrested converts (being) brought in and beaten in front of them, while others are kept in total darkness in dungeon-type cells for weeks with no human contact, so that they lose sense of time.”

International pressure forced the regime to recently release Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who was jailed under a death sentence for three years on the charge of apostasy. Many more Iranian Christian converts remain jailed across Iran.

Reza Kahlili translated this Iranian video about Islamic prophecies of a coming messiah and the destruction of Israel:

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and author of the award-winning book “A Time to Betray” (Simon & Schuster, 2010). He serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI).