Presumption of guilt and had their careers ruined during the era of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, or even killed like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The McCarthyites 'never produced a single Communist spy whose guilt was proved in court.' In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, supreme leader of Iran, pronounced a death sentence by fatwa on Salman Rushdie and anyone assisting publication of his book, "The Satanic Verses"; 'I call on all Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay'. the Fatwa was condemned for violating national sovereignty, freedom of speech, and the Muslim principle of fiqh. In the
Political thought and legacy of Ruhollah Khomeini Rushdie in particular was seen by some as a deft attempt to create a wedge issue that would prevent Muslims from imitating the West by "dividing Muslims from Westerners along the default lines of culture." The fatwa was greeted with headlines such as one in the popular British newspaper the "Daily Mirror" referring to Khomeini as "that Mad Mullah", observations in a British magazine that the Ayatollah seemed "a familiar ghost from the past - one of those villainous Muslim clerics, a Faqir of Ipi or a mad Mullah, who used to be portrayed, larger than life, in popular histories