NCRI Conference
16.30-18.00 hrs Tuesday 7th May 2024
House of Commons, Portcullis House, Westminster, London.
Can I say what a great pleasure it is to welcome my dear friend Alejo Vidal Quadras to London today. Alejo is inspirational. What other politician do you know whom after surviving an assassination attempt, returns to the fray re-invigorated and more determined than ever to overthrow the people who tried to kill him. I am privileged to call him a friend. The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet. We know who paid for the bullet and we know who ordered the attempted assassination. Their days are numbered.
For forty-five years the Iranian regime has sponsored violent abduction, hostage taking, kidnapping, blackmail, piracy, assassination, warmongering and oppression. As a gangster regime, the theocratic dictatorship has no equal. They have ploughed men and resources into proxy wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza. They have openly backed terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas and through the extra-territorial Quds Force wing of their Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), they have directed extremist operations throughout the Middle East and further afield, even sending registered diplomats on terror missions. Now they are supplying kamikaze drones and missiles to Russia for use in their illegal war in Ukraine.
The great surprise is that many countries in the West continue to negotiate with this criminal regime, treating it as a bona fide nation state. Lord Cameron repeats again and again that he believes it is important to maintain dialogue with the Mullahs’ regime and for that reason he won’t entertain blacklisting the IRGC. Why do we wish to maintain dialogue with gangsters? Why do we wish to talk to criminals?
This is abject appeasement. We should follow the American example and list the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.
We should follow the US Senate and introduce the Mahsa Act, named after the young Kurdish martyr Mahsa Amini. The Act is one of the strongest pieces of condemnatory legislation against the mullahs ever implemented and imposes draconian sanctions against the Supreme Leader, the psychotic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president Ebrahim Raisi – known as the Butcher of Tehran for his role as a key executioner during the 1988 massacre of over 30,000 political prisoners, and hundreds of other politicians, civil servants, businesses and industries who do business with Iran. The European Parliament has now passed a resolution calling for the blacklisting of the IRGC. The Belgian Senate has done likewise. Why are we holding up the white flag?
The appeasers ignore the Iranian regime’s role in planning, financing, training, and arming the Hamas extremists from Gaza who attacked Israel on 7th October. They ignore the fact that the IRGC is behind the Yemen-based Houthi drone and missile attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the attacks by Tehran's proxies on British and American military bases in the region. They ignore the fact that the Iranian regime launched an outrageous drone and ballistic missile attack on Israel last month.
With a collapsing economy and widespread poverty, repeated nationwide uprisings in Iran were marked by protesters demanding the overthrow of the regime with cries of: "Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Sheikh," indicating that they want democracy, not autocratic tyranny. Their opposition has manifested itself in the shape of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its main component part the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), led by the extraordinary Mrs Maryam Rajavi. The mullahs now fear and loathe the MEK whom they see as the only viable and organized entity with the ability to topple their regime and restore peace, justice, freedom, and democracy to the beleaguered Iranian people.
The Iranian people have had enough. Their fury has been channelled through the massive expansion of the Resistance Units of the MEK, which have burgeoned in every town and city in the country. The international community must recognize the right of the Iranian people and their Resistance Units, to use all means at their disposal to resist the ruthless machinery of suppression and to overthrow the mullahs. It must surely now have dawned on even the most ardent appeasers in the West that engaging with the Iranian regime is no longer viable. The path of appeasement has only emboldened Iran and allowed it to wreak havoc both regionally and globally.
As the clerical regime enters its final phase, it is high time for the world to take concrete measures to hold it accountable for its egregious human rights violations and crimes against humanity. The first step is to designate the IRGC as a terrorist group and shut down the regime's embassies in Europe, because they are a hub for planning terrorist acts against dissidents. By doing so, we can pave the way for a more stable and democratic Iran, eradicating the threat to regional security once and for all and making the world a safer place.
