Growing Threats From Tehran Require Firm Policy Towards Iran’s Regime

 

Written by
Aladdin Touran

If the Ontario court’s ruling does not prompt coordinated action, the regime will surely become even more obstinate in nuclear talks
The international community is facing an increasingly long list of crises involving the Iranian regime. Meanwhile, an organized Iranian opposition movement is offering clear recommendations on how to resolve those crises, with support from a politically and geographically diverse array of supporters from all around the world. Western leaders and multinational institutions may choose to listen closely to those recommendations or to ignore them as they have generally done in the past. But if they choose the latter, the situation with Iran will no doubt continue to grow worse.

One senior advisor to the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared on Monday that the regime had already developed the capability to easily produce weapons-grade uranium at the fortified and newly upgraded nuclear site at Fordo.

Of course, these threats were already well-established in the preceding weeks and months, and yet this does not seem to have stopped some Western entities from making conciliatory gestures toward the Iranian regime, apparently in hopes of encouraging a trend of moderation that has consistently failed to emerge for more than four decades.

On June 30, it was revealed that the government of Belgium had quietly signed a treaty with the Iranian ambassador to the European Union, which promised to allow Iranian citizens to serve out prison sentences in their home country if they were convicted of a crime in Belgium. The treaty was approved by the Belgian parliament on Thursday, and a prisoner exchange is likely to follow close behind, involving a former Iranian diplomat who in 2018 was arrested for leading a plot to

At midnight of Wednesday, July 29, 2022, after the Belgium parliament ratified the shameful bill that encourages terrorism and hostage-taking, several plaintiffs immediately filed their urgent complaint to the court.

The plaintiffs included Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance; Seyed Ahmed Ghazali, former Algerian Prime Minister; Giulio Terzi, former Italian Foreign Minister; Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian Senator; Linda Chavez, Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity; Robert Torricelli, former Senator from New Jersey; Tahar Boumedra, Director of JVMI and former Chief of the Human Rights Office of United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI); Dr. Sanabargh Zahedi, chair of the Judicial Committee of the NCRI; Mohammad Mohaddessin, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of NCRI; Farzin Hashemi, and Javad Dabiran, from the Foreign Affairs Committee of NCRI.

Subsequently, On Friday, the Brussels Court of Appeal banned the Belgian government from transferring the Iranian regime’s diplomat terrorist Assadollah Assadi to Iran.

A day before that decision, on Thursday, Mrs. Rajavi spoke to the media about the action taken by the Belgian parliament and expressed the belief that it “encourages further terrorism and hostage-taking”. The introduction and subsequent passage of the treaty came as a shock to some because of its clear connection to the case of Assadollah Assadi, whom a Belgian court sentenced to 20 years in prison last year for conspiring to commit terrorism and murder. Although his plot was thwarted by law enforcement, experts testified that the explosives he had smuggled into Europe were powerful enough to make a successful attack one of the worst ever on the continent.

Assadi’s trial not only confirmed his own guilt and that of three co-conspirators but also established that orders for the attack on the NCRI’s 2018 summit – an in-person gathering of roughly 100,000 people including dozens of Western lawmakers – had come from some of the highest officials within the clerical regime. Some of those same officials were quick to protest Assadi’s arrest, suggesting that because he was serving as a third counselor at the Iranian embassy in Vienna at the time, he should have been considered immune from prosecution in any venue, for any crime.

This argument, along with the underlying terrorist plot, is indicative of the sense of impunity that guides so many of Tehran’s actions and fuels the aforementioned crises. Mrs. Rajavi’s remarks on Thursday emphasize the role that Assadi’s release could have in reinforcing that impunity. Furthermore, her various supporters continue to reach out to Western leaders with explanations of how that impunity is grounded in longstanding strategies of conciliation and appeasement.

Despite exerting limited pressure on the Iranian regime over specific issues such as its nuclear ambitions, the US and Europe have been recognizably wary of any measures that might be seen as inviting war or promoting regime change. The NCRI’s response to that wariness is that the Western world need not invite war in order to lead Iran in the direction of regime change; they need only voice their support for the pro-democratic movement that is already fighting for that outcome inside Iran.

Those movements have never been clearer than in recent years. Iran has undergone at least nine anti-government uprisings since the end of 2017, while the activist community has focused much of its attention on the devastating domestic effects of the very policies and practices that Tehran uses to threaten its foreign adversaries. The regime’s wasteful spending on nuclear proliferation and the financing of regional terrorist groups is clearly a source of outrage for the Iranian people, and they clearly share an understanding with the NCRI which Western leaders have somehow missed: that this and other self-serving projects will inevitably persist for as long as the mullahs’ maintain their hold on power.

The international community should have recognized long ago that regime change is the only reliable means of solving any of the numerous crises emanating from the Iranian regime today. And amidst ever-growing international support for the organized Iranian Resistance movement, the international community should have also realized by now that regime change is eminently attainable, requiring only economic and political pressure on Tehran, along with support for the alternative which exists in the form of the NCRI.

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