The world’s most evil regime is on the brink – and Britain has nothing to do with it
Starmer’s response to the US and Israeli strikes on Iran was more Chamberlain than Churchill
Where was Britain? As missiles reportedly killed the Ayatollah in Tehran, his office in London remained open. His ambassador has not been expelled. His Revolutionary Guards have not been banned in this country, even as they are under attack in their own.
Iran, together with its allies in Beijing and Moscow, is the clearest global evil since the Nazi regime. Its tentacles stretch into Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, and into the campuses, mosques and protest movements of Britain. Yet our response has been more Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill.
What will it take for us to call an enemy an enemy? Domestically, the regime has murdered more than 40,000 citizens for the crime of calling for freedom. It has removed the uteruses of female protesters, injected prisoners with toxic substances, executed wounded activists in their hospital beds and demanded huge sums to return corpses of loved ones. The scenes of mothers weeping over the bodies of their children, or dancing in defiance at their funerals, have been unbearable.
Abroad, the regime is the foremost sponsor of terror, giving birth to Hezbollah, sponsoring Hamas and mounting scores of assassination and kidnap plots on British soil. Through its proxies, it runs a narcotics network stretching from Latin America to the Middle East, with supplies of Captagon alone fostering widespread addiction, violence and criminality.
Behind it all is a fanatical theology that lusts after an apocalyptic war to trigger the coming of the Mahdi, a 10th-century cleric who will supposedly return from invisibility to conquer the globe in the endtime. This is not an empty faith. For 47 years, the Ayatollah – who has reportedly been killed by a US or Israeli missile – has been plotting to fulfil this prophecy with a triune strategy of proxy militia, ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.
That is where Iran’s resources and ingenuity have gone. While its citizens have languished in poverty atop the second-largest gas reserves on Earth, more than half-a-trillion dollars was spent on a failed nuclear programme and about $2 billion a year on proxy militia, for the sake of little more than bigotry and superstition.
Iran could have been a G20 country. Instead, in the fume-filled Palestine Square in central Tehran, a public clock counts down the hours to the supposed destruction of the Jewish state. Well, yesterday, while Britain blocked American warplanes from RAF bases because of “international law”, Israel and the United States called time on that countdown by rising to strangle the octopus.
The move was bold and fraught with risk. Without boots on the ground, there is no guarantee that the regime, which holds a monopoly on weapons in the country, will fall. If it does, there is no guarantee that a free, stable and democratic nation will emerge from the chaos.
But sometimes evil demands courage. What odds faced our soldiers on D-Day, or our pilots during the Battle of Britain? Which returns us to Downing Street. Hours after the war began, neither our Prime Minister nor his Foreign Secretary, fresh from humiliation at the hands of a political Islamist insurgency in Gorton and Danton, had even issued a public statement.
Kemi Badenoch was clear, saying: “I stand by our allies in the US and Israel as they take on the threat of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Nigel Farage damned the “evil regime” and called on the Prime Minister to “back the Americans in this vital fight”. What did Sir Keir Starmer have to say?
After several hours, we found out. The Prime Minister’s statement highlighted that Britain had “played no role in these strikes” and bleated about “de-escalation”. True, he condemned the Iranian regime as “utterly abhorrent”. But he has used far stronger language before, about Elon Musk’s Grok, say, or the riots in Southport.
Some of the RAF’s 150 fighter planes – by comparison, the United States has more than 1,600, Israel has 350 and Iran has about 250 – had been deployed defensively in the region. But we flew no sorties against the world’s most repulsive regime, relegating our once-proud country to a footnote as history unfolded around us.
Are we secretly rather fond of the Tehran regime? Certainly, that’s true of the Gaza activists: at recent marches, the flag of the regime has fluttered alongside the colours of Palestine. To them, Israel is the sole organising principle of the universe. Blinded by their slavish devotion to that single cause, they are unable to condemn any evil that is the enemy of the Jews.
How October 7 has made us lose our minds! Hostilities may be long over in Gaza but in Britain they are just getting started. Red paint is smeared over bakeries, Gaza independents sit in Parliament, Jews live in fear and Labour – which shamefully recognised Palestine without conditions – has been branded “Zionist” by rabble rousers. Even the Green Party is flirting with swapping its hemp sandals and veganism for a formal endorsement of the old Soviet propaganda claim that “Zionism is racism”.
The day before bombs fell on Iran, Churchill’s statue overlooking Parliament was defaced with slogans calling for an “intifada”. It couldn’t be clearer. They hate Britain, they hate the West and they hate the Jews. The Ayatollah? Just a very naughty boy.
According to Zack Polanski, who fancies himself as our next prime minister, the campaign against the sickening Iranian regime was “an illegal, unprovoked and brutal attack that shows once again that the USA and Israel are rogue states”. The strategic genius that is Ed Davey demanded that Britain “rules out the use of UK bases for any future unilateral US strikes”.
From Jeremy Corbyn – who saw no problem with taking the regime’s dollar as a presenter on its propaganda television channel Press TV – to the former Conservative Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to the lamentable chair of the foreign affairs select committee Emily Thornberry, a great chorus went up to prevent us from attacking Iran. Let’s put it clearly: the worst people have been making the worst arguments in defence of the world’s worst regime.
Compare all this with the cousins of our culture. In Israel, 20,000 reservists were called up while missiles rained down on Jerusalem. In the bomb shelters, crowds were filmed dancing and singing out of love for their people and the dream of a free Persia.
On the streets of Tehran, meanwhile, amid the carnage and trepidation, people cheered on American and Israeli jets and danced defiantly in the streets. They know the price of liberty and are prepared to pay it. What courage. Imagine if Britain had not lost its way.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
