Tehran, Iran, Feb. 28 – A senior Iranian cleric has approved attacks on foreign embassies in Tehran over the publication of insulting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in European dailies, a website belonging to the office of hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reported. “Muslims must take the most ferocious stance against insults to Islamic sanctities”, the senior cleric told Ayatollah Dorri Najaf-Abadi, the country’s Chief State Prosecutor, according to the Persian-language website Khedmat.“If setting fire to embassies of countries that insult the Prophet aims to show that these countries no longer have any place in Islamic countries then this act is permissible”, the senior ayatollah was quoted as saying. “Anyone who dies in this path [of protests against the insults] is a martyr”, he said.
Khedmat did not name the senior Shiite religious leader, but Najaf-Abadi met and held talks separately with five senior ayatollahs in Qom on February 20. The ayatollahs, Moussavi Ardebili, Makarem Shirazi, Fazel Lankarani, Safi Golpayegani and Nouri Hamedani, unanimously condemned the cartoons depicting Islam’s Prophet Mohammad and described it as a “Zionist and Western conspiracy against Islam”.
“The support shown for the [cartoons] by the European Union and some European governments showed that this was not just an issue of journalism. But Muslims’ reaction was beyond expectation and it showed that Muslims have woken up and this is a great asset”, Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi told the prosecutor, according to the government-owned ISNA news agency.