When Haj Ali Razmara, the recently assassinated Prime Minister of Iran, started out on his ill-fated mission to the mosque to attend a memorial service in honor of a departed friend, he was one of the most influential men in all the Middle East. He had served his country with distinction as an officer of the Army, he had the support of Shah Pahlevi and an unquested majority of the Parliament. [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi] This being true, he felt he would have no difficulty in solving the oil controversy with the British.

He knew that his country was absolutely dependent upon the royalties it had been receiving from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and that it would be next to national suicide to stop the flow from the British-operated refineries. An amicable agreement with the British, he felt, would be much better than nationalization, which some of the Iranians were demanding. He knew, too, that Russia had her eyes on that oil, but that any concession to that country probably would lead to slavery.

But as he started to enter the mosque he was shot down by a representative of that organization that believed in government by assassination, Fidaiyan-Islam, a society that once had been banished from the country, but which recently had undergone a resurgence and had boasted that it would settle the oil controversy by direct action. It was this same Moslem organization that had been responsible for the assassination of King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan a short while before. [No, he was shot by a young Palestinian man on July 20, 1951]

And while that society has comparatively few members in all Iran, its adherents became the absolute rulers of the country from the very moment that Razmara fell. It dictated the appointment of Mossadegh as Prime Minister succeed Razmara, and that lachrymose gentleman, well educated and endowed with ability though he may be, has not dared to defy the assassins. Nor has any of Razmara’s former majority, for when Mossadegh put the issue of nationalization of oil to a vote it carried unanimously.

You may say that this sort of thing, government by assassination, could not happen here in the United States; that the representatives of the people in the Senate and the House of Representatives at Washington could not be intimidated by any group of fanatics; that we have lived under a Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and in a society that respects difference of opinion so long that no man or body of men would be so brazen as to challenge our political rights or our institutions.

But you may be wrong. For while we do not shoot men down in cold blood when they hold opinions different from our own, we do assassinate their characters. And our Fidaiyan-Islam is known as McCarthyism. It is an excrescence on the body politic that has made political cowards of scores of onetime brave and useful Americans. Just let McCarthy or one of his kind accuse someone of being a Communist, of having associated with a Communist or of having read a Communist book or paper, and he then becomes damned in the eyes of the public. McCarthyites do not even have to prove their charges.

This was shown in the recent hearing that involved Dr. Philip Jessup. Every accusation that either the Wisconsin Senator or Harold Stassen advanced was disproved by their own evidence. But the mere fact that he had been accused stamped him with the bar sinister. He had then “lost the confidence of the people,” it was said, and was no longer eligible for public service, even in the eyes of the able Senator Smith of New Jersey, [H. Alexander Smith] who had stated publicly that Jessup was in no way tainted with the Communist brush, but who voted against him nevertheless, possibly out of fear of the American Fidaiyan-Islam, whence spring the character assassins of our time.