Iran Demands

There is no political or diplomatic love lost between Canada and Iran. Canada has made no secret - at home or in international fora, including sessions at the United Nations - that it deplores the Islamic Republic of Iran's dismal record on human rights. This situation did not originate with the torture, rape and murder in Evin prison, Tehran, of Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, nor will it end with the death-by-stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.

Iran's insistence that it has the right by divine intervention, of attaining nuclear power - and that power is not necessarily merely energy-oriented, but describes the kind of power that is inherent in the state ownership of a nuclear arsenal, matched by long-range missiles - has not endeared it to democratic countries of the West. Its long-standing battle with the United Nations, with the International Atomic Energy Agency, with the United States and the European Union, has marked it as a world threat.

The country's harshly punitive death penalties for the crimes of apostasy, of 'spying' against the state, of homosexuality, of alleged promiscuity, are set in stone-age retribution against the Shia sensibilities of Sharia law. The country's intolerance for other religions, for women wishing to garb themselves immodestly by Iranian standards, for the casual intermingling of the genders, for questioning of authority, or freedom of expression is legendary.

Iran's funding, arming and fond relationship with its proxy militia in Lebanon, Hezbollah, brothers-in-Shia-Islam, presents as a vile and vicious threat to the existence of the State of Israel. Its support of Hamas and its courteous arming of that terror group too through its ally Syria, ensures the constant destabilization of the Middle East, alongside its nuclear agenda. Its allies in official Turkey, Venezuela, and North Korea round out its support network. A motley crew of sinister intent.

Any opportunity it sees to possibly embarrass Canada by claiming it to be a country that does not practise what it demands of Iran, sets its political executive into gleeful accusations that Canada is hypocritical and an exemplary of human-rights-abuse. Reflective in fact of its manipulations within the UN's Human Rights Council. Now that a young Iranian-Canadian has been murdered by three older Muslim men on the streets of Ottawa, Iran "demands" answers in the teen's death.

The country's foreign ministry's director general for Iranian expatriates' affairs made it a point to summon the Canadian charge d'affaires to express his country's extreme concern over the death of the 16-year-old Yazdan Ghiasvand Ghiasi by a gun held in the hands of Abdulhamid Wehbe, charged with Yazdan Ghiasi's murder, with Zakaria Dourhnou and Khaled Wehbe, held as accessories after the fact.

These are young men representative in part of Canada's large quotient of immigrants from Islamic countries. Young men whose families fled their countries of origin to secure for themselves benefits of the freedoms that all Canadians enjoy, including financial security not available to them in places like Iran. The three charged in the murder of young Ghiasi chose to reject Canadian norms for the allure of the kind of vile actions not normally associated with Canada.

Iran's deep "concern" in the matter is just too precious. It is so bizarre as to represent the
country's executive administration as not merely fringing lunacy, but representing it to a fearful degree. Which, come to think of it, is just what Iran's Supreme Leader and his accessories to the fact are all about in their fundamentalist Islamist zeal.