How the Iranian threat has spread inside the UK.
When will the British and Americans wake up from their Persian trance?
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At what point will the British government be forced to agree that the Islamic revolutionary regime of Iran presents a clear and present danger such that the regime must be actively contained and constrained?
The evidence for this has been there for all with eyes to see ever since the regime came to power in 1979. But it is now as blindingly obvious as is the corresponding perversity of both the British and American governments by refusing to act appropriately in response to this menace.
In recent weeks, the Jewish Chronicle (for which I write a monthly opinion column) has been uncovering more and more evidence of the threat posed by Iran to British citizens on British soil.
In the current issue of the JC, noted Iran-watcher Kasra Aarabi and the JC’s politics and investigations editor David Rose have revealed that, over the past three years, the Islamic Student Association of Britain, which has branches on university campuses in Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Cambridge, has presented a series of online talks by at least eight commanders of Iran’s key force of state repression and terrorism, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
These speakers included three who are on the UK sanctions list for their personal involvement in gross human rights abuses. One of these is closely connected to the IRGC’s Intelligence Organisation which is openly seeking to conduct terrorist attacks against Jews around the world.
These talks to students, which have been watched many thousands of times, have featured bloodcurdling calls to join the coming “apocalyptic war” against non-Muslims, Holocaust denial as well as other forms of flagrant antisemitism.
One of these speakers, Saeed Ghasemi, denied the Holocaust, bragged about training al-Qaeda terrorists and urged his student audience to join “the beautiful list of soldiers” who would fight and kill Jews in a coming apocalyptic war. Another IRGC speaker, Hossein Yekta, told students to view themselves as “holy warriors” and promised that “the era of the Jews” would soon be at an end.
All this to incite students at British universities to join a terrorist war against Britain. Worse still is the nature of these men.
Ghasemi, writes Aarabi, is known as one of the most violent and extremist commanders of the IRGC’s notorious “Plainclothes Unit” which detains, tortures and executes Iranian civilians involved in anti-regime protests. Yekta, he says, is nothing short of a youth indoctrinator and recruiter for the IRGC.
A third speaker was Ali Fazli. During Iran’s 2009 anti-regime protests, Fazli was a senior commander of the IRGC’s Sarallah HQ, the key national-security outfit during times of unrest. He was personally responsible for overseeing all the police and security crackdowns on civilians during that uprising, resulting in the murder of hundreds of Iranian civilians as well as detaining and torturing thousands of others.
Over the course of recent weeks, the JC has published a series of important scoops about Iranian regime activity in Britain which is going on under the noses of the authorities. In articles here and here, Rose and Felix Pope exposed an extensive level of co-operation between British and Iranian universities on research that has possible military applications, including swarming drone technology, jet engines and armour plating. More than a dozen British universities are involved including Cambridge, Imperial College, Glasgow, Edinburgh, King’s College London, Northumbria and Liverpool. At least one of these projects is directly funded by the Iranian regime.
As the Sunday Times reported two days ago, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, now believes that the IRGC is the biggest threat to Britain’s national security. Braverman is said to be concerned by intelligence reports that Iranian spies are attempting to recruit members of organised crime gangs to target regime opponents.
This is significant because the British government recently decided not to proscribe the IRGC. That was a very bad mistake. As Aarabi writes:
Existing sanctions on the IRGC do not prohibit the IRGC’s propaganda activities and its ability to radicalise and even recruit British nationals for terror operations.
Although these activities have been going on for years, the hosting of the IRGC commanders takes this onto a new and terrifying level. Aarabi writes:
The current sanctions regime on the IRGC does not prohibit its propaganda activities or ability to disseminate jihadi propaganda. This means, despite hosting some of the IRGC’s most violent and extremist indoctrinators and recruiters, the Islamic Student Association has not committed an offence.
This is why terror legislation is so key and why it must be used against the IRGC. Proscription would give the UK government, Charity Commission and tech companies a clear mandate to prohibit any propaganda activity related to the IRGC, a mandate it currently lacks. It would also provide our local communities — including schools and police — with necessary safeguarding tools to prevent against IRGC or Shia radicalisation…
Meanwhile, the IRGC activities taking place in London are happening at a time when the Guard is not only conducting direct terrorist plots against UK nationals, but is openly seeking to nurture homegrown Islamist radicalisation and terrorism in the UK, using tactics identical to Isis and al-Qaeda.
So why is the British government still refusing to proscribe the IRGC? As Rose writes here:
As of early January, it seemed that the government was on the verge of taking this step.
It is the most open of secrets that Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Security Minister Tom Tugendhat have long regarded the move as essential to protect UK lives and national security. And way back then, at the start of the year, I was told by well-placed sources that Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had come to agree.
Almost immediately, however, the pushback began, first from Cleverly’s officials, then from Cleverly himself, and so far, it has prevailed. I’m instinctively wary when I hear several, seemingly unrelated justifications for a particular policy, but this is what’s been happening over the IRGC.
In no particular order, the reasons I’ve been given for not proscribing it include: that if we did, this would put the lives of British dual national being held in Iranian prisons at risk; that it would scupper any chance of “engaging” with the regime, and so spoil any chance of a revived deal over curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons programme; that it would likely make the Iranians close the British embassy in Tehran, and deprive us of a base for gathering intelligence; and that our American allies don’t want us to do it, although the US itself took this step years ago.
Do any of those reasons outweigh the benefits of making it much more difficult for the IRGC to operate in the UK – and to render the activities of bodies such as the Islamic Students Association of Britain unlawful? As we report in this week’s paper, intelligence experts and senior MPs from both main parties, including shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and the Conservative foreign affairs select committee chair Alicia Kearns, don’t think they do. Indeed, the Commons voted overwhelmingly in favour of proscription in a non-binding resolution earlier this year.
Yet still, somehow, Cleverly and the Foreign Office “blob” continue to prevail.
The west’s attitude to the Iranian regime has long been utterly baffling. From the moment these Islamic fanatics came to power in 1979, Iran has been in a state of self-declared war against America, Britain, Israel and the west. Over the decades, it has mounted repeated attacks on British, American, Israeli and other western interests. Yet Britain and America have refused to take adequate action to constrain it.
On the contrary, America and Britain actually sought to empower Tehran through the 2015 nuclear deal. Contrary to American and British claims that this agreement would neutralise the Iranian nuclear threat, it actually legitimised an eventual Iranian nuclear bomb — while funnelling billions in sanctions relief into Tehran’s coffers, thus enabling it to ramp up its infernal activities.
Former US President Donald Trump withdrew America from the deal in 2018 and restored sanctions. Since taking office, the Biden administration has persistently grovelled to Tehran to induce it to return to a refreshed nuclear programme/sanctions relief deal. And Britain has been backing these efforts.
In 2019, the Daily Telegraph revealed that in 2015 the British authorities had uncovered a terrorist plot by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army. The key point was that this had been kept secret for four years.
In a bomb factory on the outskirts of London, three metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate had been discovered — more than was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people — stashed in ice packs. This was apparently no rogue plot, but part of an international Hezbollah operation laying the groundwork for future attacks.
The London cell was uncovered by MI5 and the police after reportedly being tipped off by Israel’s Mossad. The suspicion was that the British government kept the discovery secret because it was heavily committed to the Iran nuclear deal brokered by US President Barack Obama, which was concluded the following month.
Such persistent appeasement and empowerment of the world’s premier terrorist state, which is committed to holy war against America and Britain as well as wiping Israel off the map, is beyond belief. America’s unhinged Iran obsession dates back to the administration of Barack Obama, whose fingerprints (along with his former officials) are all over the Biden administration’s extraordinary contortions in trying to get Tehran to sign up to a new agreement.
Britain’s backing for such an unconscionable deal is generally ascribed to the Foreign Office’s historic posture of genuflection to the Muslim world, along with its strategy of never permitting any daylight to be detected between the UK and America.
Yet a powerful report published last month by Policy Exchange, urging the British government in the strongest possible terms to junk the Iran nuclear deal and take urgent measures to constrain and isolate Tehran, was written by a team led by an archetypal member of the Foreign Office “camel corps”, the UK’s former ambassador to Syria, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia Sir John Jenkins.
This must-read report says that the threat posed by Iran is far wider and greater than just its nuclear programme upon which the west has been fixated. The authors write:
Iranian expansion across the Middle East will continue unless there is a Western — and indeed a regional Arab — policy change. Iran has links with proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, as well as enduring if sometime oscillating relationships with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas. The longer Iranian regional expansion is left unchecked, the more Iran will cement its hegemony over significant parts of the Levant, Iraq and the southern Arabian Peninsula, intensify its efforts to undermine and eventually destroy Israel and expand its presence beyond the Middle East.
Iran will soon expand its support to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Having already transferred drones to Russia, Iran is likely soon to begin transfers of advanced ballistic missiles to the Kremlin. In October, under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile exports will lapse, making such transfers legal under international law. Iran has also accelerated its programme of nuclear enrichment, reaching the cusp of weapons-grade uranium and developing centrifuge and other related technologies at existing and new sites. Iranian nuclear advancement and military assistance to Russia — like Iran an increasingly hostile revanchist power with shared interests in Syria — increase the odds that President Putin, with the right incentives, will see advantage in assisting Iran with nuclear breakout, transferring advanced military technology, and supporting Iranian intelligence activity in Europe and the UK…
Iran has thorough sub-threshold capabilities, including operatives within the UK and links to transnational organised crime. Iran simultaneously claims the legal rights of a traditional polity and contravenes international law, allowing it to act in concert with organised criminal entities, conduct assassinations and kidnappings abroad, and participate in the international drug trade. In the last 15 months, MI5 Director Ken McCallum and Counterterrorism Policing lead Matt Jukes have identified 12 to 15 cases of Iranian plots within the UK against British citizens or Iranian dissidents.
The report also contains the following eye-opening passage:
Iran’s Islamic organisations in the UK have also influenced British electoral politics, most recently courting former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in 2019. Indeed, Iranian influence on the SNP [the Scottish National Party that controls the devolved Scottish government] runs deep. In 2015, former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond led a formal trade delegation to Iran. A number of SNP officials are linked to Iranian agents, including East Kilbride Councillor Ali Salamati — moreover, the Iranian-linked charity Ahl al-Bayt has received significant donations from the Scottish government.
Iranian social media and cyber capabilities amplify Iranian manipulation. Iran has sought to use astroturfed social media accounts in the past to support Scottish separatism, doing so during the previous Scottish Independence Referendum and during other Scottish elections. If the SNP execute a Catalan-style illegal referendum, their effort will receive Iranian support. Nicola Sturgeon’s exit as SNP Leader and Scottish First Minister may increase the possibility of pro-Iranian penetration. As of this writing, Humza Yousaf, currently second in polling for SNP Leader [now Leader and first Minister], has historical connections to Islamist-sympathetic groups. Although he has no direct connections to Iran, a Yousaf win would ease the task of Iranian social media operatives seeking to encourage broader Muslim support for Scottish separatism.
Iran’s infiltration of Scotland’s politics and its manipulation of Scottish separatism in order to damage the UK have received until now zero public attention. If the Westminster government regards the SNP as itself thus posing a danger to UK security, and if it is alarmed about this aggressive infiltration by the Iranian terror state into Scottish and therefore British politics, it hasn’t told the rest of us.
The report’s authors warn:
Absent decisive action, the UK risks accepting both a nuclearised Middle East and persistent Iranian strategic expansion. An Iranian nuclear arsenal will trigger regional proliferation and increase sub-threshold rivalry in the Middle East that raises the likelihood of direct confrontation. Iran thrives off ungoverned spaces generated by major military conflicts. As we have repeatedly seen, its Arab neighbours do not have the military capacity to resist or roll back Iranian gains. This means Iranian expansion is likely to continue unabated unless there is a collective and systematic western response to it. Moreover, without an Iran policy, the UK risks facing a major regional conflict, that will put at risk the British economy and hundreds of thousands of British citizens, without the capacity for a serious and effective response.
British strategy must go beyond preserving the status quo. Indeed this no longer exists.
When will the British and Americans wake up from their Iranian trance?
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