How ignorant Britain sneers and sniggers at the threat from Iran

For a distressing snapshot of how Britain is steadily sliding into irrelevance and indeed civilisational defeat, take a look at this week’s edition of BBC TV’s Question Time where I was on the panel. My statement that Iran currently posed the greatest threat to the UK and the west provoked a display of truly shocking ignorance amongst the political class, as well as venomous imbecility and resistance to truth-telling amongst the public.

There was booing and general outrage and disbelief at my remarks that Iran was a mortal threat to the west, that it was working to get a nuclear bomb in order to carry out its threat to exterminate Israel and ratchet up its war against the free world, and that it was impossible to negotiate with the religious fanatics ruling Iran, people who believe that producing an apocalypse will hasten the return to earth of the Shia ‘messiah’, the Mahdi. 

All these statements, however, are true.  There are countless references, in books, articles and scholarly journals, to the grip of the ‘Twelver’ sect -- the most extreme proponents of the Mahdi belief -- on the Iranian ruling elite. Here are just a few.

A former Iranian diplomat who defected to Norway in 2010 warned:

‘ “If Iran is given more time, it will acquire the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb within a year.” Asked whether it would use the bomb against Israel, he said: “If Iran gets to the point where it has an atomic bomb, it will certainly use it, against Israel or any other [enemy] country.” 

‘...“They are busying themselves with ideological preparations for the arrival of the hidden Imam and are preparing the ground for that in a practical way; for this purpose, they are willing to spill much blood and destroy many countries.”’

The grip of ‘Twelver’ fanaticism on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is described here: 

‘Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, whose journal deals with the return of the Mahdi; in 2005 it wrote that the Koran calls on Muslims "to wage war against the unbelievers and prepare the way for the advent of the Mahdi." A Yazdi disciple has given the religious justification for the use of nuclear weapons. Yazdi was a teacher at the Haqqani School which trained senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian intelligence services. He continues to appear in various events sponsored by the Revolutionary Guards.’  

This video, which surfaced in 2011, claims that Iran is destined to rise as a great power in the last days of the world to help defeat America and Israel and usher in the return of the Mahdi. And it makes clear the Iranians believe that time is fast approaching.

In 2012, the representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader  Ayatollah Khamanei urged action to provoke the reappearance of the Mahdi.

And here is a roundup of more references to the ‘Twelver’ sect.

Despite all this, London Mayor Boris Johnson -- in reply to an Iranian woman in the audience who tried to draw a disgusting parallel between the desirability of taking action against genocidal Iran and its putative victim, Israel -- came up with the staggering claim that Iran was not trying to manufacture nuclear weapons and was no threat to the west.

This despite the fact that Iran has been conducting acts of terror against western interests since the Iranian revolution in 1979; that it waged war against and caused the deaths of countless British and western forces in Iraq; and that its centrifuges are spinning in order to equip itself with nuclear weapons to carry out its infernal aims, a purpose attested by every western intelligence agency and even by the International Atomic Energy Authority, which said in 2011 that Iran has carried out tests ‘relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device’.

Then there was the view expressed by another panel member, the Energy Secretary Ed Davey, that the new Iranian President Hassan Rohani was a moderate whose election gave hope for a solution to the Iranian crisis. But Rohani is not a moderate at all, merely a wily operator who poses as such in order to dupe western gulls such as Ed Davey. A former nuclear negotiator, Rohani has previouslyboasted that he enabled Iran to make critical progress with its nuclear programme even while negotiations were proceeding. As Cranmer has pointed out, Rohani is neither moderate nor a reformer:

‘All streams of Islam believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days in the company of Isa (Jesus). But President/Cleric Rouhani pledged himself with Ayatollah Khamenei decades ago to work for the return of the Mahdi. Indeed, Iran's military involvement in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq is purposely designed to agitate against Israel to hasten the Last Day.’

 Not only that, the Argentine government has said that Rohani was connected  to the 1994 terrorist bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people and injured 300:

‘Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani was on the special Iranian government committee that plotted the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, The Washington Free Beacon reported, citing an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case.

‘According to a 2006 indictment, the decision to launch the attack in Argentina was made within a special operations committee connected to the powerful Supreme National Security Council in August 1993.

‘According to the report, former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi testified in 2006 that Rohani was a member of the special committee, as he was then serving as secretary of the council.

‘“With regard to the committee’s role in the decision to carry out the AMIA attack, Moghadam stated that this decision was made under the direction of Ali Khamenei, and that the other members of the committee were [then-Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani, Mir Hejazi, Rohani, Velayati and Fallahijan,” the Free Beacon quoted the indictment as saying.’

The oafish idiocy and worse of the Question Time audience was bad enough, and an ominous omen for Britain’s increasingly tenuous grip on reason. But the ignorance about matters so vital to the security of the free world, displayed by both a Cabinet Minister and the politician considered by many to be the best future hope of leading the Conservative party to victory, was simply terrifying as an indication of Britain’s now apparently terminal decline.