1. The protests in Iran have shown to the world how hungry ordinary Iranians are for a government that represents the wishes of the Iranian people.
2. In response, the Iranian government, on the orders of the Mullah’s, have responded with extreme violence - by arresting hundreds and killing scores of Iranian subjects.
3. The Iranian regime claims that the pro-democracy demonstrators are being funded and encouraged by the British government. But it is the Iranian government that have been interfering in British affairs – not the other way round.
The murder of Neda Soltan at the hands of the Basij, a voluntary force of Khomeinite inspired thugs, raised the profile of the riots in Iran against the brutal and authoritarian regime. Her death was a defiant one as it came after the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, gave Friday prayers calling for an end to the protests.
During his sermon, last Friday, at the University of Tehran, Khameini delivered a bold and uncompromising message to the pro-democracy activists who are desperate for “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Any hope of Khameini delivering an Abraham Lincoln style Gettysburg address was soon dashed when he gave this piece of clerical guidance: “Try to forget about politics and remember spirituality.” A crude apology for theocracy if ever there was one. The “elections”, Khameini said, were nothing more than “a celebration of the revolution”. But the Iranian people are clearly not in mood for celebrating - they want self-determination.
So far, the protests against Khameini’s choice for President, the megalomaniac and Holocaust denying Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, has already seen thirty-two people killed (some put the figure at fifty-three). Explaining who he thought was responsible for the uprising, Manoucher Mottaki, Iranian Foreign Minister, confirmed the analysis of the Supreme Leader and said that Britain has been planning for “two years to overthrow the Islamic Republic” and through Israeli agents is trying to "weaken the national solidarity, threaten territorial integrity and disintegrate Iran." Britain, he said, should “stay out of Iranian affairs”.
The level of irony in this paranoid statement cannot be over stated. For starters, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been fighting a covert war against the West for thirty years. This is perfectly demonstrated by Ronen Bergman in “The Secret War with Iran” (see here). He points to how Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, operates in the United States, Canada, South America and Europe. He looks at Iranian involvement in training Al-Qaeda terrorists in Sudan during the 1990’s. And he claims how Hezbollah were ordered by the Iranians to “hoodwink” the United States and Great Britain so as to distract attention away from the nuclear programme.
However, during the recent liberations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iranian regime under Khameini and President Ahmadinejad has put their best efforts into subverting progress in the region.
Here are just some of the illegal activities Iran has committed over the last six years: It has recruited at least one British traitor to spy on NATO officials and his fellow countrymen in Afghanistan; kidnapped British sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf; supported Khomeinite and Wahabbi inspired terrorists and gangsters in Iraq; and murdered up to forty British troops by supplying weapons to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. (In September last year, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s ambassador in Kabul, said on Newsnight that British soldiers had intercepted weapons shipments donated from “within the Iranian regime.”)
During the fierce early years of the liberation of Iraq, the Iranians told Sir John Sawers – who was recently appointed head of MI6 - that they would stop murdering our troops if we allowed them to carry on with their “nuclear programme without let or hindrance.” This is very same nuclear programme, which the IAEA has said it has “serious concerns” about, particularly over the “military dimensions”, and is in breach of five UN Security Council Resolutions (1696, 1737, 1747, 1803 and 1835). And finally, they have developed an inter-continental ballistic missile programme that threatens Southern Europe and coalition military bases in the Middle East who are on the front line in the fight against Iranian sponsored global terrorism.
The inert British Foreign Office believes that they are being terribly clever by not taking sides over the whole affair. (It’s best not to get involved in other people’s affairs; they might end up hating us.”) However, if the British and Americans interfered more in Iranian affairs, perhaps we would all, Iranians included, be safer from this Persian nightmare.