This year’s UN General Assembly was a hotbed of dissent and disagreement. World leaders tore into their enemies from the podium, while pious diplomats reverted to their usual displays of virtue signalling – staging walkouts and delivering relentless rants about Gaza. Yet amid all the acrimony came one unlikely act of solidarity between enemy states. Or at least an attempt at one.
Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon was caught on camera approaching his Iranian counterpart to offer the Persian people Starlink services, allowing them to access the internet despite the draconian censorship imposed by Tehran’s mad mullahs.
During his UN speech, Benjamin Netanyahu held up a Starlink satellite and said: ‘The Iranian leaders are especially afraid when their people have this – a communications device, Starlink, that allows people to access truth, to exercise choice, to exercise freedom of thought and freedom of speech. That’s why the Iranian regime spends millions of dollars censoring the internet.’
Afterwards, Danon approached his counterpart and said: ‘I thought it’s appropriate to give you the Starlink. It can be very useful for you to allow the Iranian people to get their freedom after what you did to them. Do you want to take it and deliver it back to Tehran?’
Danon was, of course, blanked. But the gesture – performative though it plainly was – received a rapturous response from Iranian dissidents on social media. For Iran’s long-suffering people, the message was clear: Tehran’s tyrants would rather keep an entire nation suffocating in the dark than risk loosening their grip on power.
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