July 10, 2021 — The Iranian people have a proud and distinguished history. Persia’s cultural artefacts are scattered around the world’s great museums…. It’s rich legacy in literature, music, dance and poetry have affected cultures across the world from Omar Khayam to chess. It pains us to see what it has become in the hands of narrowminded, bigoted fanatics.
Iran’s history did not begin on 1 February 1979 with Ayatollah Khomenei’s return from exile in Paris. Iran’s identity was not created by the Islamic revolution, nor will its future be defined by it. In the meantime we have to deal with a dangerous, Draconian and destabilising regime which oppresses its own people and exports fanaticism and instability to its own region and beyond.
The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has never wavered in his hatred of the United States, his contempt for the existence of the state of Israel and his belief in the purity of the Islamic revolution free from cultural influences from outside. Only half jokingly do his critics claim that he is more afraid of McDonald’s than Mossad.
Under his leadership the IRGC has tightened its grip on Iranian society, and especially its economic infrastructure, locking out the opportunity – to themselves and to the whole nation – that the natural innovation of the Iranian people could bring.
None of us have any quarrel with the Iranian people but with the regime that increasingly oppresses them, that exports violence and instability to its neighbours and which threatens to provoke conflict through its attempt to become a nuclear weapon state.
It is a surprising, not to say troubling, phenomenon that so little criticism of Iran’s internal behaviour appears in our liberal media. While they are very quick to condemn neighbouring states such as Saudi Arabia, little is said about the oppression of critics of the Iranian leadership or the fact that so many of Iran’s brightest and best, including many of its media and political activists, lie languishing in its prisons.
The persecution of minorities, the hanging from cranes of young gay men and its forced gender reassignment go largely overlooked by many of those who claim to be champions of human rights while political opponents, and even their family members, often simply disappear. Let me say today that for some of us they will never be forgotten.
The root of Iran’s exports of instability lies in the ambition of Khamenei and his cronies to be the leaders not only of Shia Islam, but of Islam itself. There is a carefully crafted strategy whose design is to replace national identity with religious fervour, aimed at creating a new radicalised generation.
In neighbouring states like Bahrain they try to persuade young men that they are not Bahrainis first with their own national identity but that they are Shia first – owing their allegiance to religious leaders in Iran rather than to the culture and laws of the nation in which they have been brought up.
It is a pattern that is repeated over and over again in the region. No better examples can be seen than their willingness to spread division and violence in Iraq and Syria as a means of fostering the ambitions of Iran’s leadership.
But their own malign influence is not confined to their immediate neighbours.
Even as European countries sought ways to try and finance trade with the Iranian regime, Iranian-inspired terror groups were increasing their activities across the continent.
In the Netherlands, two Iranian diplomats were expelled, in June 2018, for plotting political assassinations in the country.
A bomb plot to target a rally of opposition groups in Paris was foiled by French intelligence and in the UK a terrorist cell with links to Iran had been caught stockpiling tonnes of ammonium nitrate explosives on the outskirts of London at a secret bomb factory.
Iran has also been a consistent supporter of US-designated Palestinian terrorist organizations, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas.
Lebanese Hezbollah remains Iran’s primary terrorist proxy. The group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, bluntly declared that “Hezbollah gets its money and arms from Iran, and as long as Iran has money, so does Hezbollah.”
And of course, through its proxies Iran continues both direct attacks on Israel itself and on Israeli targets in other parts of the world. They give effect to the hatred of the Supreme Leader for the very existence of the Israeli state.
How galling it must have been for him to see the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Internationally, the great piece of unfinished business is the JCPOA, the attempt to stop Iran becoming a nuclear weapon state.
I always believed the agreement was fundamentally flawed. It was neither credible nor responsible to see Iran’s nuclear ambitions outside its support and encouragement for its terror proxies and the original aim of stopping Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon state had morphed into a deal merely to put its ambitions on hold for a decade or so even before the deal was concluded.
Iran was immediately rewarded for signing, not implementing, the agreement by the immediate unfreezing of $150 billion worth of Iranian assets.
The effect of the financial settlement was that Iran got what it wanted in terms of economic relief at the start with mere promises of delivery later on.
Repeated breaches of international law on the development of ballistic missile systems beg the question that if a nation has nothing that it wishes to deliver by such a system why would it spend so much money, at a time of great hardship for its own people, on such technology.
An agreement may be possible, but it must take account of Iran’s human rights abuses, its export of terror, its explicit threat to the security of Israel and its attempts to destabilise its regional, neighbours.
Above all, we must return to the position that we will stop, not delay, Iran’s nuclear weapon ambitions.
Wishful thinking may be an attractive idea, but it is a poor basis for foreign or security policy.
