BLACKLISTING IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARD IS A NO-BRAINER

When will the British appeasers wake up? Despite repeated calls from several former cabinet ministers and MPs from all sides of the House of Commons, to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the Iranian regime’s Gestapo – Rishi Sunak has dug his heels in. The Prime Minister claims that it would be a mistake to sever diplomatic ties with Iran at such a critical time. His view has been reinforced by his foreign secretary David Cameron who says it is vital for Britain to maintain an embassy in Tehran so that the UK can “deliver a direct message to the Iranians”. Winston Churchill must be turning in his grave. He famously said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last”.

President Trump added the IRGC to America’s foreign terrorist list in April 2019. He said: “Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft”. The UK’s refusal to follow the American lead is a sign of wretched weakness, which will embolden Tehran. Indeed, the British embassy in Tehran has become a focal point for phoney protests, where thousands of members of the mullahs’ thuggish paramilitary Basij are sent to demonstrate their faux fury at Britain’s support for Israel.

The brutality of the IRGC is legendary. Their vicious onslaught on the nationwide uprising in 2022 that followed the murder in custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, led to 750 protesters being killed and over 30,000 arrested, many of whom have been raped, tortured and executed, in what the UN has described as an abuse of human rights and a crime against humanity. 

On the international stage, the IRGC and its extra-territorial Quds Force, has spread terror like a cancer, fomenting conflict across the Middle East for decades, backing Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The IRGC has been the main warmongering factor supplying finance, weapons and personnel to its proxies and masterminding the catastrophic Hamas attack on Israel on 7^thOctober last year that triggered the war in Gaza. Indeed, the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1^st April, killing IRGC Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and 6 other Quds Force commanders, was explicit retaliation for their key role in directing a barrage of attacks on Israel from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.

The IRGC’s involvement in international terrorism is also well documented. They have deployed registered Iranian diplomats as terrorist bombers, like Assadollah Assadi, the attaché from the Iranian embassy in Vienna, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for handing over a half kilo bomb to 3 co-conspirators and ordering them to detonate the device at a huge Iranian opposition rally in Paris in 2018. Assassinations have also become a common feature of IRGC activities abroad, targeting ex-pat Iranians, journalists and even senior Western politicians who criticize the mullahs’ repressive regime.

Maintaining diplomatic links with this nest of vipers has echoes of Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. Proscribing the IRGC would send a strong message to the mullahs that Britain will no longer tolerate their belligerent and hostile behaviour. It would also have a profoundly beneficial impact on ordinary Iranians, who hate the mullahs’ regime and all of its adjuncts. It would signal that Britain supports the courageous Resistance Units who are fighting to overthrow this tyrannical regime and restore democracy, freedom, justice, human rights, women’s rights, and peace to their beleaguered nation.