Western appeasers are turning cartwheels in their attempts to woo Masoud Pezeshkian, the new president of Iran. Convinced that the 70-year-old Islamic loyalist is a ‘reformist’ and a ‘moderate’, the appeasers are covering their eyes and ears to the ongoing repression and tyranny in Iran and the mullahs’ wider sponsorship of terror in the Middle East and worldwide. So desperate has Josep Borrell, the EU’s deluded High Representative for Foreign Affairs become, that he even despatched his chief of staff, Enrique Mora, to attend Peseshkian’s inauguration ceremony in Tehran. The hapless EU diplomat found himself seated ignominiously in the second row, immediately behind the terrorist leaders of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Indeed, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was killed hours later by an Israeli airstrike in Tehran, after attending the inauguration.

Mora’s attendance at the ceremony has caused outrage in Brussels with several senior members of the European Parliament (MEPs) stating that it had turned the EU into an international laughingstock. Iranian MPs attending the inauguration even chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during the event, much to Mora’s embarrassment. Rihards Kols MEP from Latvia, accused Mora of doing “harm by legitimizing a regime that brutalizes its own people, sponsors terrorism globally, and sows discord.”

The EU presence at the event was particularly galling as it followed the recent publication of an explosive UN report on Iran accusing the mullahs of human rights abuses, crimes against humanity and genocide. The report by the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, has described in detail the heinous crimes and violations in Iran, including the 1988 massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners, most of whom were members or supporters of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the main democratic opposition movement. The UN rapporteur describes the 1988 massacre as a crime against humanity and genocide and calls for the perpetrators, many of whom still hold senior positions in the Iranian hierarchy, to be held to account. Professor Rehman said: “Those who committed crimes against humanity in the 1980s and beyond must be held accountable, and impunity within the Islamic Republic of Iran must come to an end”. Instead, Josep Borrell chose to expose the EU’s shameful cowardice and weakness, by sending his chief of staff to shake the bloodstained hands of the mullahs and their terrorist comrades.

Now, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowing retaliation against Israel for the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, there is growing fear that the Israeli-Gaza conflict could spread to Lebanon and lead to an all-out conflagration involving all of the terrorist groups sponsored and controlled by Tehran. That, in turn, could draw in the mullahs’ closest allies like Russia, China and North Korea, triggering an inevitable response in support of Israel by America and the UK. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned, on 5^th August, that a full-scale conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon could erupt within the next 48 hours, ordering all American citizens to leave Lebanon immediately.

Inexplicably, Josep Borrell still appears to believe that the long-dead Iranian nuclear deal can somehow be resurrected. Wholly abandoned by the West, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has been dead in the water for years. It was signed by Obama in 2015 and unilaterally dumped by President Trump in 2018 when he described it as the worst deal in US history. The short-lived deal was used by the mullahs as a convenient cover for their clandestine campaign to accelerate the production of a nuclear weapon. When the Biden administration and the EU misguidedly tried to raise the zombie deal from the dead in a wretched act of appeasement, the mullahs demanded the lifting of sanctions, to enable them to redouble their funding and support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shi’ia militias in Iraq. Indeed, it is well known that Tehran was directly behind the brutal terrorist Hamas assault on Israel that triggered the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

Now, even Joe Biden has abandoned all attempts at reviving the JCPOA, but un-deterred, Josep Borrell, as the West’s leading appeaser, seems determined to press ahead with increasingly desperate efforts to resume talks. The fact that the Iranian regime is openly supplying kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles to Russia for Putin to use in his illegal war in the Ukraine, and to the Houthis in Yemen for them to use in attacks on commercial shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, seems to have been ignored by Borrell. So too has the mullahs’ direct involvement in the attempted assassination of Professor Alejo Vidal Quadras, a senior Spanish politician and former Vice President of the European Parliament, who the Iranian regime tried to kill outside his home in Madrid last November. Borrell seems oblivious to all of these outrages. Perhaps he feels that in the closing weeks of his disastrous 5-year term in office, he can save the mullahs’ tyrannical regime from being overthrown by another inevitable uprising by the Iranian people, who seek freedom, justice, democracy and an end to Western appeasement.

In an attempt to justify Enrique Mora’s attendance at the Inauguration Ceremony in Tehran, Peter Stano, the European Commission’s spokesperson for foreign affairs, said that the senior EU diplomat was there to “use his interaction with officials of the incoming Iranian administration in Tehran to convey EU positions on all the issues of concerns we have related to Iran”. Stano said: “Our relations with Iran are at a very, very low level for different reasons: for violation of human rights of people in Iran, for Iran’s support for Russia’s illegal aggression against Ukraine, for arbitrary detentions of EU citizens. So, these are all issues that we are actively tackling with them. These are the messages we are conveying to them. These are the issues we are trying to solve with them.” After 45 years of trying to solve these issues, since the mullahs seized power after the 1979 revolution in Iran, it may be worth Josep Borrell reflecting on Winston Churchill’s famous statement: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

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STRUAN STEVENSON

Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.