To the Editor:

Daniel Pipes describes Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie as unprecedented, since “no head of government had ever called for the execution of a novelist living in another country” [“Two Decades of the Rushdie Rules,” October]. It was indeed. Ayatollah Khomeini was a leader who did unprecedented things. In November of 1979, Iranians invaded the American Embassy and imprisoned 52 Americans there for 444 days. By doing so, he violated the tradition of respecting embassies and their personnel that had existed for centuries.

Pipes writes about Rushdie, “Leftist intellectuals were more likely to stand by him…than were those on the right.” That too was unprecedented. The Marxist-Islamic alliance had begun in 1955 at the Bandung Conference, which was held in Bandung, Indonesia. The second and third worlds united at that time to fight the United States and Israel. The alliance reached its first peak in the United States in 1967, at the National Conference for the New Politics, which took place in Chicago three months after the Six-Day War. The conference issued a condemnation of “the imperialist Zionist war” between Israel and the Arab states (reported in the New York Times on September 3, 1967).

For leftists, anti-Zionism takes precedence over every other issue. The Marxist-Islamic alliance is growing stronger every day.

George Jochnowitz

New York City

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To the Editor:

Much has been written about what the Koran really teaches, but at the end of the day, what matters most is how Sharia is interpreted and implemented. Thanks to Daniel Pipes, there is no ambiguity left: Sharia equals slavery. Pipes’s work is outstanding, and this article, in particular, deserves wide dissemination.

William Donohue

President, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

New York City