nak’s spokesman said, we would be deprived of ‘one of our most effective channels for avoiding escalation.’ I get that. But you might be forgiven for thinking: so what? This is a regime bent on war, murder and the subjugation of the West. Surely it’s no time for more fruitless jaw-jaw?
Meanwhile they operate happily in the UK, targeting Iranian dissidents, stirring up Islamic extremists…
In 2022, the director general of MI5 revealed that the IRGC had attempted ten assassinations in Britain that year. In his annual speech on the threats facing Britain, Ken McCallum said Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ was actively planning terrorist attacks on British soil, labelling it as ‘the state actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism’. Tehran was a ‘sophisticated adversary’, he added. Last year, Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing at the Met, disclosed that 15 Iranian plots to either kidnap or kill people in the UK had been foiled.
The stabbing of journalist Pouria Zeraati this month, believed to be at the hands of the IRGC, was a case in point (it goes without saying that he has called for the group to be banned). But this is far from the first time Iranian agents have threatened violence, or indeed carried it out.
Last year, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, confirmed that Iranian agents were mapping prominent Jews in Britain for possible targeting in the event of a war with Israel. In 1992, dissident television presenter Fereydoun Farrokhzad was knifed to death in Bonn. In 2021, an Iranian diplomat was convicted of plotting to bomb an opposition rally in Paris. And in 2019, an Iranian ex-pat in Glasgow told the Times that he had been threatened by regime goons with a handgun.
But the chaps at the Foreign Office believe, at the end of the day, that they'll listen to reason and respond to sanctions like sensible fellows..
The conclusion is clear. The fanatics of Tehran are not good chaps at heart that just need to be placated. They are not like you and me, and certainly nothing like Winchester-educated Mr Sunak, or Eton’s Lord Cameron. They are gripped by a deeply malevolent ideology that lusts after an apocalyptic war. They have a threefold strategy to achieve this: overseas militia, ballistic missiles and nukes. They are serious. To think that British sanctions will contain the threat is like trying to stop a rampaging knifeman with a fine.
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