The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal Iran

(Right to Left) Caspian Makan, fiance of iconic Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan whose death was videotaped and broadcast around the world, listens in Ottawa on Tuesday while Canadian MP Irwin Cotler introduces a report titled "The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition". Nazanin Afshin-Jam, President and Co-Founder of Stop Child Executions looks on. (Matthew Little/The Epoch Times)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced the imposition by Canada of additional sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, to top off those just recently issued by the UN Security council, representing the fourth round of such sanctions. While preparing to host the G8 and G22 summits, the Prime Minister is also positioning Canada as a strong advocate of justice and human rights, positioning Canada as an ally of Israel and an adversary of Iran in stark black and white.

For its part, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never been shy at UN fora, to accuse Canada of human rights abuses - primarily against Muslims and our aboriginal populations. Iran, like other Middle Eastern and Muslim countries has become adept at gleefully turning the West's accusations of human rights abuses charged to them, against the very same countries that hold it in contempt for its theocratic totalitarianism. And in the fora of the United Nations, most particularly in the Human Rights Council, that plays to an appreciative audience.

Canada, in any event, has very little trade with Iran, unlike Europe, hugely anxious not to disrupt oil and gas shipments from the country which has an immense excess of both, but which is incapable of refining it due to a lack of in-country refining capability. Iran has not seen fit to plow back any of its fossil-fuel profits into refining self-sufficiency, which makes it doubly ironic that it insists it must build costly nuclear installations to provide for alternate energy sources for itself.

Needless to say, this is an issue that the Security Council, much less Iran's partners in the Middle East haven't bought into, with the stark realization that Iran's agenda lies elsewhere, in contriving to isolate itself from IAEA inspections with its intentions to enrich uranium to a degree useful in producing nuclear warheads. Which it promises anyone who will listen, will be unleashed upon Israel, to eradicate the Jewish state from the map of the Middle East.

The one product that Canada does export to Iran is grain, a commodity whose removal would harm only the country's population, held in unwilling thrall to the reigning Ayatollahs and the Republican Guard. A group of activists, the Responsibility to Protect Coalition, comprised of international scholars and politicians within Canada fear that the sanctions are still not sufficiently structured to halt Iran's nuclear program. Prime Minister Harper explains that:

"These sanctions are designed to restrict Iran's nuclear program and are in no way intended to punish the Iranian people. Instead, these targeted measures are meant to send a strong signal to Iran that the international community expects Iran to meet its international nuclear obligations. They send a message to all states - particularly those with nuclear aspirations - that international standards cannot be flouted without consequences."

This should, at the very least, earn Canada some additionally vividly-worded UN Human Rights Council censures. From the mouth of the ambassador of Iran to that sagacious body. Iran will not be entirely delighted that there is an additional curb on its international investment opportunities and commercial activities including the securement of uranium and nuclear technology advances. Given that even Russia is standing down on honouring its commitment to provide Iran with advanced rocket launchers. For the time being.

The group issuing the report critical of Iran and calling for additional measures to impact on its aspirations, call for a broader, tougher range of sanctions to suppress the regime's plans. The report, The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran claims it is incumbent on the international community to advance beyond the last of the UN Security Council resolutions, and ban gas shipments to Iran, among other more stringent measures.

How it is that a country that has normalized calling for the annihilation of another country to the extent that the august United Nations hardly blinks an eye, and still is able to muster support from like human-rights-destructive countries; has been able to defy the international community (the democratic countries of the West; the Security Council, the U.S., the E.U., its Middle East neighbours) is beyond comprehension.

Iran's President Ahmadinejad is able to mock the condemnations levelled against it by the international community, because nothing anyone or any body constructs to thwart its plans has been remotely successful. The country still has its stalwarts, particularly two within the Security Council itself, and can count among those countries who support its 'peaceful' agenda, and battle with the "Zionist entity" countries like Turkey, no longer secular and (European-)Western-oriented, along with Venezuela, North Korea and Syria, a line-up of some of the world's most miserable dictatorships. (Afghanistan and Pakistan, not to be overlooked.)

Iran, like any country whose international-social dissonance is such that it covets nuclear weaponry while cossetting militias dedicated to the violent overthrow of democratic governments, arming, training and covertly utilizing terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas to deliver their message of unrepentant raging hatred, will remain defiant to the bitter end. It's just simply that as a clear and present danger to international peace and security the spectre of the bitter end is what haunts.

Its agenda of state-sponsored terrorism, its control of well-armed and religion-sanctioned jihadis, its ideological certainty that it has the ear, the eye and the blessing of Allah, and thus does nothing but secure its own place in Paradise, allied with its bellicose and belligerent need to strike fear into the hearts of other countries, while violating the basic core of human rights entitlements of its own people, mark it as a very special country indeed.

Second in the world for the number of executions the state carries out, it represents as the world's leading executioner of children. Its solution for the scourge of homosexuality and for apostates and for those practising 'false' versions of Islam is imprisonment, torture, death. Its dedication to the persecution of its own people, its commitment to inflicting fear wherever it can, sets it apart as an particularly officiously odious regime.

Sham trials, forced confessions, systematic prison rape are all the marks of a brutal theocracy determined to hold its grasp on power, to relinquish it to no one other than God, and needless to say, God is on their side.