Don't kill the messenger

Ready for some bad news? President Trump is nothing if not an agent of discord and an enemy of established order. One merely has to look at his alienation of long time allies like Canada, Italy, Britain and Nato and his new choice of friends in Moscow and North Korea to know that the deck has been radically shuffled.

But some conventions are sacrosanct and should not be trifled with, like the protection of envoys and diplomats. We don't kill the messenger. It's an old rule.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on social media. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again.”

In a 20-minute phone call with Fox News, which revealed his sensitivity to the criticism being directed at him by Republicans and Democrats alike, he said: “We may take over the strait, if we have to. If they don’t make a deal, we’ll collect tolls.”

Referring to the strait, he appeared to threaten to kidnap the Iranian negotiators, saying: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”

Yesterday Trump intimated, with customary crude profanity, that if things didn't go his way, Iranian diplomats would never make it back to their country. This sort of threat is taboo in diplomatic circles and undercuts approximately a thousand years of war time civility and behavior.

This all started back in the thirteenth century. 

Between 1219 and 1221, the Mongol forces under Genghis Khan invaded the lands of the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia. 

When a senior Mongol diplomat was executed by Khwarazmshah Muhammed II, Khan mobilized his forces and invaded, laying waste to Khorasan, destroying Herat, Nishapur, and Merv, three of the largest cities in the world. 

Herodotus records that when heralds of the Persian king Xerxes demanded "earth and water" (i.e., symbols of submission) of Greek cities, the Athenians threw them into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well for the purpose of suggesting they would find both earth and water at the bottom, these often being mentioned by the messenger as a threat of siege.

Vlad Țepeș aka Vlad the Impaler, the Volvolde of Wallachia, was said to have nailed the turbans of Turkish emissaries to their heads when they demanded he collect certain taxes. 

In the Crusades, the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was sent by the Holy See to negotiate some way to bring back the gnostic Cathar heretics to the faith, and in turn he was murdered by the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI.

A Roman envoy was urinated on as he was leaving the city of Tarentum. The oath of the envoy, "This stain will be washed away with blood!", was fulfilled during the Pyrrhic War.

William of Tyre mentions how the Templars killed an Assassin envoy in an ambush in order to prevent him returning home with the peace treaty he had arranged with the Franks.

Sultan Mehmed Han crushed the skull of the Hungarian envoy despite the Prophet Muhammad's prohibition on killing messengers.

The concept of diplomatic immunity can be found in ancient Indian epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, where messengers and diplomats were given immunity from capital punishment. 

In Ramayana, when the demon king Ravana ordered the killing of Hanuman, Ravana's younger brother Vibhishana pointed out that messengers or diplomats should not be killed, as per ancient practices.

Count Matveyev

The British Parliament first guaranteed diplomatic immunity to foreign ambassadors under the Diplomatic Privileges Act in 1709, after Count Andrey Matveyev, a Russian resident in London, was subjected to verbal and physical abuse by British bailiffs.

The problem with bellicose bullies like the President is that one day it might be another country threatening our envoys and I would like to think that we would want to see them respected as well. 

There are minimal rules of behavior in diplomatic circles but this is actually a quite important one.

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