It seems that there is no wrong Iran could do to undermine the U.S. determination to pursue conciliatory diplomacy with the Islamic Republic. In the past week and during the latest round of indirect talks between Iran and the U.S. in Vienna, the Iranian official state policy of assassinating the author Salman Rushdie nearly came to fruition, the Department of Justice exposed an IRGC assassination plot targeting former U.S. officials, and the Iranians continue to demand major unreasonable concessions, yet neither the U.S. nor the EU is willing to confront Iran on its behavior. With enemies like these, who needs friends?

In 1989, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a murderous decree in the form of an Islamic legal opinion, fatwa, against the British Muslim author Salman Rushdie as a punishment for his book Satanic Verses. Due to the status of the man who issued it, the fatwa acquired the status of both state policy and an Islamic Shia binding ruling. Despite later Iranian ambiguity on the issue, current Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei openly considered the ruling to be solid and irrevocable, and Hassan Nassrallah, the leader of the Iranian proxy terrorist group, Hezbollah, often reminded his followers of the fatwa. 

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About the speaker: Shoshana Bryen is a leading specialist in U.S. defense policy and Middle East affairs. The former Executive Director and SeniorDirector for Security Policy at JINSA, Mrs. Bryen was author of the widely republished JINSA Reports. She has worked with the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, and lectured at the National Defense University in Washington.

Mrs. Bryen coordinated programs in the Middle East for military professionals that allowed more than 450 American military officers to engage in professional discussions of issues that both unite and divide the United States, Israel and Jordan. She also created a program to take the cadets and midshipmen of America’s service academies to Israel for a three-week work/study program that has permitted hundreds of future officers to have a positive, in-depth experience in Israel. She has also taken Turkish and Israeli military officers to speak at the service academies and has lectured in the  academies as well.

Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun and Defense News, among other outlets, as well as in JINSA Reports.

She is a Member of the Advisory Board of the Aleethia Foundation that provides opportunities for wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and is a Member of the Board of the Naval Academy Jewish Chapel Foundation.