http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A1FF6395C11728DDDA10A94DB405B8084F1D3&scp=1&sq=%22Green%20Book%22%20Khomeini&st=cse

Clive Irving, who wrote the forward, has written widely on the Middle East including a history of Iran.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A1FF6395C11728DDDA10A94DB405B8084F1D3&scp=1&sq=%22Green%20Book%22%20Khomeini&st=cse

A little research shows that the book was likely commissioned by the French leftie writer/publisher/disturber of the peace Jean Edern Hallier.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19970116/ai_n9643240

My French isn’t very good but a history of Editions Hallier Libre is here

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:1vsZmeBY1EYJ:www.jean-edern.fr/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D55%253Acreation-des-editions-hallier%26catid%3D51%253A70s%26Itemid%3D64+%22Jean-Edern+Hallier%22+%22Editions+Hallier%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2

This online edition of the 1979 Hallier Book contains the paragraph cited by Mark Steyn.. and countless other rules. One of them states that “Eleven things are impure: urine, dung, semen, bones, blood, dogs, pigs, NON MUSLIMS, wine, beer, sweat of camels who eat garbage”.

http://www.pointdebasculecanada.ca/spip.php?article488&var_recherche=khomeini

Harold Salemson, 78, Film and Book Critic

Published: August 28, 1988

Harold J. Salemson, a former film and book critic who translated biographies of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Georges Simenon, died Thursday at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, L.I., after suffering a heart attack. He was 78 and had lived in Glen Cove for 30 years.

Born in Chicago, Mr. Salemson was educated at home by his parents until they moved to France in 1922. He attended the University of Montpellier and the Sorbonne. Later, he attended the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

After returning to France in 1928, Mr. Salemson contributed to English and French literary publications and became a film critic for Le Monde. For two years, he headed a literary magazine, Tambour, which published works by Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, and Andre Maurois, among others.

In 1966, Mr. Salemson became a book reviewer for Newsday and began translating books. Among the more than 20 books he translated were ”Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times,” by Pierre Cabanne, and ”The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali,” an autobiography.

and more here from the Dictionary of Literary Biography

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/harold-jason-salemson-dlb/

…Translations were an important part of Salemson’s work. His translation into English of Cocteau’s poem “Angel Wuthercut” was published in the New Review and reprinted in Putnam’s The European Caravan (1931). Others include translations for French periodicals of Eugene O’Neill’s “Moon of the Caribbees” and “Bound East for Cardiff,” the novellas of V. F. Calverton, and an early piece by Eric Blair (later known as George Orwell) for Monde.

Salemson returned to the United States in November 1930. Pursuing his interest in movies, he went to Hollywood in 1931 as critic and correspondent for L’Intransigeant, then the leading Paris evening newspaper, and its affiliated publications, including the movie weekly Pour Vous and the sports weekly Match (later Paris-Match). These properties were bought in 1938 by Paris-Soir, and Salemson was retained on the staff as Hollywood bureau head until the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940. During the same period he worked in several capacities on films and contributed extensively to periodicals in the United States and abroad. He was then one of the few writers in English giving films the serious critical attention they later came to receive generally. In World War II he was involved in the Mediterranean Theatre during the invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and he wrote the leaflets dropped by plane throughout the landings in the South of France. Although he was blacklisted in the late forties and the fifties, he continued to work in both the artistic and executive ends of the movie industry. Salemson and his wife live in Glen Cove, Long Island. He has taught film courses, subtitled foreign films, worked at free-lance writing and editing assignments, and continues to translate French books into English….

Ayatollah leaves little to chance The Green Book instructs on every subject from politics to sex

Tuesday, January 29, 1980 P. 17

William French

Toronto ON — First it was Mao and his Little Red Book, now it’s the Ayatollah and his Little Green Book. And while the thoughts of Chairman Mao may have had a more profound influence on the history of the twentieth century – so far – Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomaini is more engaging to read. Hardly any aspect of human behavior is left to chance by Khomaini, and he even provides instructions for the proper way to go to the bathroom.

Sayings Of the Ayatollah Khomaini will be published shortly by Bantam as a $2.25 paperback. It’s a translation of a French edition which became an immediate bestseller when it was published in Paris last September. The French edition was dubbed The Little Green Book because of its cover, and Bantam has preserved the color scheme.

In an introduction to the Bantam edition, Clive Irving, former managing editor of The London Sunday Times, observes that to anyone reared and educated into the assumptions of Western life, the sayings of the Ayatollah are words from an alien mind. Many of the sentiments expressed here will seem – by turns – offensive, risible, pathological, obsessive, says Irving. But their strangeness cannot be lightly cast aside . . . For these are the words of a man who brought down – with words, not arms – the most elaborately armed regime in the Islamic world.

The book is a collection of extracts from three books of Khomaini’s teachings, The Kingdom of the Learned, The Key To Mysteries and The Explanation of Problems, all of which were originally published in Persian.