But he [Ruhollah Khomeini] held to his dream of an Islamic republic and retained his Islamic fervor -scuttling a tentative economic and political opening to the West in with his call for the killing of a British author, Salman Rushdie, whose novel ‘‘The Satanic Verses’’ was deemed to have blasphemed the faith.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.