Iran: Terrorism Central

"The fact is that most major terrorism's financial abettors and supporters ... have successfully avoided criminal prosecution."
"Civil liability cases ... associated with terrorism may constitute the best constraints we have against their activities and our best chances to hold them accountable."
Victor Comras, UN appointed overseer of Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act

The Islamic Republic of Iran has more than adequately demonstrated its commitment to human rights abuses through its traditional and ongoing investment in terrorism as a tool of Islamist jihad. From 1979 when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris to administer a new Iran on the overthrow of Shah Pahlevi, a new Islamism has arisen, refreshing the concept of violent expressions of jihadist conquest.

That was the year that Iranian militant students led by clerics steeped in the new fanaticism of resurgent jihad stormed the United States embassy in Tehran to take 52 Americans hostage and hold them as prisoners of Iranian Islamism for 444 days until Jimmy Carter left office and Ronald Reagan took the presidency. This bold act of international terrorism inaugurated a new era in Iranian/American relations, one that Supreme Leader Khomeini praised to the skies.

The Iranian Republic twice named two men linked to the hostage taking to ambassadorial positions in Canada in 2007, and both were rejected for their links to that international outrage. Leading Iran to expel Canada's ambassador in retaliation for the insufferable insult. In 2003 Iranian-Canadian Zahra Kazemi a freelance photojournalist visited her native country and was given a permit to take photographs of Iranians. Doing just that in front of Evin prison in Tehran, of protesters landed her in Evin prison.

Where she was beaten, raped and tortured. When she was transferred eventually in an unconscious state, to a hospital in Tehran, she had a brain injury, a fractured nose, crushed eardrum, back and leg wounds, fractured bones and broken nails on hands and feet, along with extensive trauma on and around her genital area. She was removed from life support and pronounced dead. Requests from her family in Canada to have her body returned were ignored.

And Saeed Mortazavi, the Iranian prosecutor general, responsible for and involved in her torture was dispatched to Geneva three years later representing the Iranian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council. That has its more current echoes in the past week's election by the United Nations of Syria's ambassador Bashar J'afari as Rapporteur of the UN on its Decolonization Committee; a fitting post for a representative of a human-rights-abusing regime.

IRGC Navy Commander Adm. Ali Fadavi said that enemies will never dare to attack Iran because they are afraid of Iran’s deterrent power. Photo: Shiite Media / flickr

Iran continues to arrest people they accuse of "insulting the sanctity of Islam" and for "insulting Ira's supreme leader". Journalists and human rights defenders find themselves as well locked into Iranian jails. Pro-democracy uprisings are crushed, and inmates of Iran's prisons can expect torture of a prison system that is infamous for being the venue of the world's highest per capita rate of executions, where minors are sentenced to death for "criminal acts" while people of the LGBT community and religious and ethnic minorities regularly have their human rights violated.

The much-celebrated election two years ago of a "moderate" president when Hassan Rouhani replaced his volubly unstable and sinister predecessor Mahmoud Ahmedinejad simply highlights the international community's unwillingness to face the reality of a nuclear-weapons-aspiring, terrorist-supporting state that has been given a free pass by the members of the Security Council plus Germany to continue its malevolence on the world stage, restoring its financial stability in the process.

And nor could international corporations from France, Germany, the United States and elsewhere contain themselves with excitement at the prospect of being able at last to enter the Iranian market and conduct deals of trade and investment, further enriching the Republic to enable it to continue funding groups like Lebanon's Hezbollah, Hamas in Gaza, the Yemenite Houthis and Shiite militias fighting alongside Syria's military, killing Sunni Syrians.



From Iran's tasking the Republican Guard Corps al Quds division to set up a new Shiite death squad comprised of willing martyrs calling themselves Hezbollah, who performed their first missions to resounding success in Beirut in 1983, targeting American and French military barracks and the U.S. embassy, leading to hundreds of deaths, to later missions in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Burgas Bulgaria, Iran's involvement in international atrocities is well known, but preferably ignored.