Strasbourg
Wednesday 14th January 2009
Text of Speech by Mr. Struan Stevenson, MEP:
The horrific events in Gaza during the past 2 weeks have brought international condemnation against Israel. We have witnessed colleagues during this debate today lining up to see who could express the strongest outrage against the Jewish State. For one country in the Middle East, this was exactly the outcome they had sought. Iran has supplied missiles and munitions and other sophisticated weaponry to Hamas for years. They have provided money and training for the Hamas fighters. Their objective was to provoke Israel into a ground war and the bloody result, with gruesome photos of dead children on TV screens and newspapers around the world, is the best possible recruiting sergeant for fundamentalist Islam and the Iranian mullah’s vision of a global Islamist movement united against the West and its apostate, secular supporters. They did the same in Lebanon during the July 2006 war between Hizbollah & Israel.
The fascist regime in Tehran is the main sponsor of war and terror in the Middle East and the tragic outcome is exactly what Tehran wanted. It distracts domestic attention in Iran from the economic crisis caused by the collapse in the price of oil and distracts international attention from the mullah’s rush to produce a nuclear weapon. Iran’s foreign policy objective is to become the dominant regional power in the Middle East. They want to unite the Islamic world in submission to their own austere and disturbing vision of a totalitarian Islamic brotherhood, where human rights, women’s rights and freedom of speech are ground into the dust. Shamefully, the West has done nothing to confront or expose Iranian aggression. Faced with mounting evidence of the mullah’s sponsorship of terror, the West has gone out of its way to appease Tehran, even agreeing to their primary demand of disabling the main Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), by placing them on the EU Terror List.
It is a great shame that the recent French Presidency of the EU, became a willing tool of the Iranian regime in this power play. Despite receiving well-earned plaudits for successfully handling an arduous agenda during their presidency, France has nonetheless marred the institutional integrity of Europe by three times defying rulings of the Court of First Instance. The court has ordered the immediate delisting of the PMOI from the EU Terror List following similar verdicts in Britain last June. In fact there have been no fewer than seven separate court rulings calling for the delisting of the PMOI. Each time the courts stated that there were no lawful grounds for keeping them on the terror blacklist. But, the EU Council, at France's behest, has refused to comply with the courts, coming frighteningly close to exemplifying how, as Lord Acton famously said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Struan Stevenson, MEP
Vice President EPP-ED Group
