World IN BRIEF : IRAN : Rafsanjani Assails West Over Rushdie
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From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani accused the West of resurrecting the Salman Rushdie affair, saying the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death call against the author of “The Satanic Verses” for blaspheming Islam was merely an Islamic scholar’s viewpoint, Tehran Radio said. Rafsanjani, who leads the pragmatist camp among Iran’s ruling clerics, charged that the West is biased against Iran because it interprets Islam as a system of government and tries to spread the ideology beyond its borders.
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