For some 27 years, the Iranian people have lived under a regime which has denied them any respect for human rights. It’s a regime that governs by brutality and is probably the only regime in the world which condemns children to death. Which only a few months ago, publicly hanged a 16 year old girl and sentenced a 13 year old girl to death, because they didn’t comply with the rules imposed by the mullahs on women. A regime which whipped a 14 year old boy until he died, for eating in the street during Ramadan.
A regime which has imposed death sentences on more than 100 people during the four months since the new president was elected. A regime that has been condemned on more than 50 occasions by United Nations bodies for its total indifference to human rights and that is the business of the whole global community. Because the world now recognises that when a government treats its own citizens in that way, it isn’t just a private affair between the government and the citizens. If freedom and dignity are denied anywhere, then they are at risk everywhere and unless the human family cares for all its members, then all its members are in danger. So for that reason, even if it stood alone, we can probably call on the world to support the people of Iran in their struggle for freedom.
The mullah’s don’t confine their terrorism within the borders of Iran. They can hardly complain that what they do isn’t the business of the whole world, when they have made it the business of the world. This country has reason to know that many years ago when the ayatollahs promulgated a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, living in Britain but declaring it the duty of all Muslims to kill him. Now that falls squarely within any possible definition of international terrorism.
In 1983 when the regime arranged for the suicide bombing of a United States naval base in Beirut, that was terrorism by any conceivable standard. Recently, ‘Time Magazine’ published its findings about the involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in attacks on coalition forces in Iraq, and the world was forced to concern itself with international terrorism. And on the 6th of October, even our own Prime Minister had to warn the regime in Iran from supplying explosives in Iraq for attacks on British troops. Now the process is becoming more sinister.
The Iranian regime is seriously embarked on a nuclear weapons programme, in flagrant breach of its treaty obligations. It is the centre of a network of terrorist activities which threatens the whole world and the world will be safe only when the people of Iran are safe and that’s why it defies reason and common sense when those who protest of this terrorism, who often at great personal risk work to bring the terrorism to an end are labelled by the British government as terrorists. The PMOI have suffered from the terrorism and the brutality of the regime more than anyone. 120,000 of their members have been executed or assassinated. So who are the terrorists?
