I just received the following email from Iranian writer Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi (recently interviewed by Jamie Glazov):

Hello Everyone,

Now NPR interviews assassins of innocent Iranians and airs their garbage as news worthy...Please listen to this broadcast ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4652644 ). If you are as offended by this rubbish, as I am, please contact NPR's Ombudsman, Mr. Jeffrey Dvorkin (jdvorkin@npr.org) to graciously let him know that interviewing this murderer is an utter abomination! David Bellfield (a.k.a Salahedin) is a criminal and MUST pay his debt to society!

This transgression by NPR is very embarrassing indeed.

Thank you.

Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi

From Mujahadeen to the Movies: Salahuddin

NPR's Mike Shuster profiles Dahwud Salahuddin, a black Muslim born in the United States who has lived in Iran for most of the last 25 years. Salahuddin fought with the Mujahadeen -- the Iranians who opposed the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s -- played an American doctor in a recent Iranian film, and is a fugitive from American justice.

I did a little digging through my usual far right sources, and finally settled on the extremist New Yorker. The man is in fact a cold blooded assassin who admits to gunning down a member of the Iranian opposition here in the United States, for which he was paid $5000. His philosophy is, well, murderous (but polite enough for public radio):

On the street in Tehran, Salahuddin looks more like a visiting Islamic scholar from Qom than like a murderer. He is about six feet tall, has a closely cropped beard, and wears a knee-length tunic. "Generally, I blend in," Salahuddin said earlier this year. "I could be an Iranian Arab or an Iranian Baluch." He is a cordial, soft-spoken, and, it seems, even-tempered man. Yet he has declared that he is ready to kill again, "in certain circumstances." He also approves of bombing buildings if, in his opinion, they are "symbols of arrogant American power."

In conversations that took place over five days in Tehran last February, Salahuddin admitted to murdering Tabatabai. "I shot him," Salahuddin said, with no sign of discomfort or remorse, when I asked him about the killing during our first meeting. In a later e-mail, Salahuddin insisted that there was nothing "murderous" in his killing of Tabatabai. "It was an act of war," he wrote, and a religious duty. "In Islamic religious terms, taking a life is sometimes sanctioned and even highly praised, and I thought that event was just such a time." Some interpretations of Islamic law allow for killing when it is seen as a way to protect the Muslim community, and Salahuddin seems to have appropriated this view for his own ends. He was, by his own description, an "angry and alienated" African-American with "a good dose of rage with the American establishment." He told me that if the opportunity to kill Tabatabai had not come along, he is sure that he would have done something else like it, or something on an even larger scale. "I was primed for violence, and I thought about cratering the White House a quarter century before Al Qaeda did," he wrote to me. "It would be accurate to say that my biggest aspiration was to bring America to its knees, but I didn't know how."

I asked Salahuddin what he thought he would have accomplished by assassinating Kissinger. "It's like this—you deal with a bully," he began. "You go to school the first day, a guy takes your lunch money, and that's going to go on every day of the year until you do something to him that will discourage that kind of behavior." He added that even though he knew there was "an excellent chance" that he would get shot by Kissinger's bodyguards, he was prepared to go ahead. "I don't see myself as being in love with danger," he wrote in an e-mail, but "the excitement of it is a psychic drug and in the midst of potential life-and-death circumstances you understand what it is to be alive."

Salahuddin discovered, in his early years in Iran, that even though he believed in violent jihad, there were limits to his militancy. In the eighties, he said, a branch of Iranian military intelligence asked him to hijack planes, but, he said, "there is something about being trapped inside of something that I would not give in to." He added, "I might do other things if it's just bang and gone, but the idea of keeping people under pressure. . . . "

The way NPR wrote up this interview, I'd have never known they were interviewing such an exciting character.

I wonder how they'd bill an interview with Charles Manson, anyway.