The Sun
1 May 2006
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Trevor Kavanagh
THE world has three options as it faces the terrifying prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.
It can watch the mullahs build nukes and hold the world to ransom.
It can denounce American aggression- while secretly counting on the world’s only superpower to ride to everyone’s rescue.
Or it can encourage the Iranian people themselves to topple the fanatics who threaten global Armageddon.
Since no world leader, including President George Bush, wants a US strike, the safest bet is to encourage an already seething domestic resistance.
Yet Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has ruled it out, leaving us with one nightmare vision a tyrannical regime ready and willing to wage nuclear war.
He rejects the use of American force as “inconceivable.” But in an act of appeasement that has enraged MPs of all parties, he has barred Iran’s only real internal resistance, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI).
He upholds the distorted EU view that they are “terrorists” simply because Tehran says they are.
It was the price the ayatollahs extracted for continuing to talk to Britain, France and Germany the so-called “E3” about their nuclear ambitions.
Those talks proved to be a dangerous waste of breath.
The gullible trio squandered three years trying to bring Iran to heel while its leaders were taking irrevocable steps to becoming a nuclear power.
Tortured
Now, as brave Iranian citizens are tortured and slaughtered for standing up to the evil regime, Europe is effectively helping the mullahs destroy them.
By branding the PMOI terrorist, they give police squads authority to round up and murder them.
The vast majority of ordinary Iranians despise the Islamic zealots running Iran.
The population are young, bright and ambitious to join the enlightened, prosperous West. They are appalled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe Israel off the map.
And thousands courageously risk their lives to make their protests public.
Yet the West looks on as the regime crushes these “terrorists” acts with unimaginable brutality.
Women and children are hanged. Boys have their eyes gouged out or are flogged to death. Men suffer unspeakable torture before being butchered.
Iran’s tentacles spread far beyond its borders.
Their fingerprints are on almost every act of international terrorism.
They effectively rule Syria, sponsor Hamas and fuel insurrection in Iraq.
The mullahs are killing our soldiers in Basra. Death squads hunt down the regime’s critics abroad. Exiled Hossein Abedini told me last week how he was ambushed by assassins in Istanbul, pumped full of bullets and left for dead in 1990.
Mr. Abedini, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran which includes the PMOI, suffers to this day from wounds to his lungs, kidney, liver and spleen.
“I was in a deep coma for 40 days and unconscious for three months,” he said.
He bitterly denounced the EU ban on Iranian resistance.
Ironic
“Ahmadinejad’s cabinet are the Who’s who of international terrorism,” he said.
“It is preposterous and ironic for the EU to put a terrorist tag on the main victims of Iranian terrorism.”
A Commons committee backed by an overwhelming majority of MPs and peers want the PMOI ban lifted.
Its chairman, former Labour MP Lord Corbett, dismisses claims that a popular uprising cannot succeed.
“We have seen evidence in Katmandu, in Nepal, Georgia and Ukraine that when the people make up their minds, nobody can stand in their way.
“We should be supporting them, not banning them.”
