The retired IRGC general may be in a minority in believing that Israel grows hydroponic-style human robots, but then again spreading hatred of Israel - and enabling terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah - does seem to be the IRGC's main function. So why won't the government ban them?
Almost 140 MPs and peers including former cabinet ministers from all the main political parties have written to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to demand that his government finally takes action to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.
The letter says that in the wake of the IRGC-led drone and missile attack on Israel last weekend, the need to proscribe the IRGC, which the government has been considering since the start of last year, is “more crucial and pertinent” than ever....
“The IRGC has never posed a greater threat within the UK,” says the letter, which was delivered on Thursday morning. “A range of their activities have been publicly disclosed, causing significant concern across our nation. These include assassination plots uncovered and foiled by MI5, intelligence gathering on British-Jewish targets by UK-based criminal networks, intimidation of journalists including Iranian journalists, and radicalisation in British Islamic centres.
“Additionally, the group has held British citizens as hostages and perpetrated numerous killings. Similar patterns of malicious behaviour have been observed by our European allies, including terror attacks in Germany and thwarted plots in Greece and France. Last month, IRGC thugs reportedly even carried out a stabbing against an Iran International journalist outside his home in Wimbledon” – a reference to the attack on the Iranian dissident TV presenter Pouria Zeraati.
The letter in the Times is here.
Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator:
Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’
Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Surely if the Iranians could just be persuaded to pull on some pads and play a round of cricket, we could sort this frightful mess out?
According to the PM, Britain will not blacklist the IRGC for fear that the regime would retaliate by breaking off diplomatic relations. Without diplomatic channels, Sunak’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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