FAWNING SUPPLICATION

Despite more than 100 former world leaders urging the global community to support the popular uprising against Iran’s tyrannical regime, its chief appeasers in the West, US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron, appear to be actively conspiring with the brutal mullahs.

Both Biden and Macron seem foolishly determined to lift the international sanctions on Iran and resurrect the zombie nuclear deal, designed to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon but used as a cover to do just that. In an act of fawning supplication, Macron even tried to ban a rally held by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Paris on 1^stJuly, but was thwarted by legal action in the French courts.

Meanwhile, an outrageous and unwarranted attack by more than 1,200 police on Ashraf 3, an Iranian dissidents’ camp in Albania that is home to around 3,000 refugees who support the opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI-MEK), was carried out with the blessing of US officials. In an operation coordinated by Albania’s Special Prosecution against Organised Crime and Corruption (Spak), police used tear gas, pepper spray and rubber batons. One of the Ashrafi refugees died and more than 100 were hospitalised. 

The head of Spak, Altin Dumani, was appointed in December and is known to have been the US State Department’s favoured candidate. Following the attack, the State Department issued a statement to the media endorsing the operation and adding: “The United States does not see the MEK as a viable democratic opposition movement that is representative of the Iranian people.” 

This is a blatantly absurd statement as an outright majority of members of the US Congress and the US Senate have signed a letter supporting the Iranian uprising and the PMOI/MEK, as well as their ten-point plan for restoring peace, freedom, justice, democracy, women’s rights, human rights, an end to the death penalty, and an end to the nuclear threat.

The camp attack was a disgraceful breach of international law and justice, and a manifestation of the servile appeasement of the Tehran regime by the American and French presidents. In a chilling development, the Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has reported that some of the 213 computers seized during the raid were given to the Tehran regime. Fars said: “Sepehr Khalaji, head of the Government Information Council, stated ‘part of the hard drives and casings have been received.’” 

This could be a bluff by the mullahs, but if it’s true, information gleaned from the computers could lead to the arrest, torture, and execution of the families and supporters of the MEK and the Iranian resistance throughout the country. If Biden or his Secretary of State Antony Blinken were involved in the Albanian police raid in any way, it would be one of the worst cases of collaboration with a criminal regime since the Second World War.

Almost as incredibly, it has been revealed that Macron’s decision to try to ban the NCRI rally in Paris was made after he had a 90-minute phone call with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Dubbed “The Butcher of Tehran”, Raisi is a notorious executioner and violator of human rights and was one of the perpetrators of the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, mostly supporters of the PMOI/MEK. That Macron should surrender to the exhortations of this pariah president is deeply concerning.

It may be connected to the fact that the Iranian regime currently holds four French hostages, who it has accused of trumped-up crimes in a bid to criminally blackmail the French government. But capitulating to such gangster-like behaviour is a grave mistake and will simply embolden the mullahs to commit further acts of international terror, bullying and hostage-taking.

As Biden and Macron kowtowed to the mullahs’ tyrannical regime, true leadership was displayed by some 117 former world leaders, including former US Vice President Mike Pence, who addressed the NCRI summit, and three Nobel Peace Prize laureates. They signed a letter of support for the Iranian uprising and the PMOI-MEK which was sent to Biden, European Council President Charles Michel, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A copy was also given to the leaders of all 27 EU member states. The letter is significant, as it has broken the wall of silence from the international community that, for decades, has provided the Iranian regime with a sense of impunity.

The signatories and the 85 million Iranians who are seeking international backing for their demand for regime change will be dismayed at Biden and Macron’s contemptible efforts to restore the Iran nuclear deal, even though it has been exposed as a charade. 

All this sickening appeasement of the mullahs has been compounded by the news that the UN Human Rights Council’s Social Forum in Geneva intends to appoint an ambassador from Iran as its chair in November and that Iran has also been elected as one of the five vice-presidents of the UN General Assembly. This really is farcical and undermines the credibility of the whole organisation. It is ironic that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the agreement to create the United Nations, made by Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Tehran Summit in November 1943.

As this theocratic, fascist regime enters its terminal phase, it is high time the world took concrete measures to hold the mullahs accountable for their appalling human rights violations. Iranians must be allowed to exercise their fundamental human rights without fear of reprisal. Justice and freedom are contagious, and the world must support the Iranian people in taking down their tyrants.