Middle East

As of now, it is possible to draw a number of immediate conclusions from the war currently under way between the alliance of the United States and Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Firstly, the range and nature of US and Israeli targeting indicates that a determined attempt to destroy the 47 year old regime in Iran is now finally under way. The most senior leadership, up to and including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, appear to have been targeted – and possibly killed – by Israel. Action of this kind make sense only as part of a comprehensive attempt at regime destruction. History provides no unambiguous examples of regimes removed by

Think about how bad things would have to be for ordinary Iranians to plead for Donald Trump to carry out military intervention against their own country (though in reality, against their hostage takers, the Islamic Republic). Iranian women, children, men, flora and fauna are dying at the hands of the Iranian regime. Killing is what they do Iran, the world’s oldest country, has been ruled by a theocratic authoritarian terrorist regime for the past 47 years. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the ayatollahs took over, a mafia of clerical families took the Iranian people hostage. In the ensuing half decade, the country with the fourth largest oil reserves

Why was he here? It’s a question we are forced to ask over and over again in borderless Britain, after another asylum seeker is convicted of another monstrous crime. This time, it is the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. Twenty-three-year-old Afghan national Ahmad Mulakhil was found guilty on Tuesday of rape, child abduction, sexual assault and taking indecent photos of a child following his ten-day trial at Warwick Crown Court. The details boil the blood. Mulakhil came across the girl playing in a park The details boil the blood. Mulakhil came across the girl playing in a park. He took her to a cul-de-sac, where he repeatedly raped her. He

The news that Shahid Butt, a man convicted of terrorism who served five years for conspiring to bomb the British consulate in Yemen, is standing as a pro-Gaza candidate for Birmingham City Council has shocked many. Butt was jailed in 1999 as part of a terror plot linked to Abu Hamza, yet now seeks public office representing constituents in the Sparkhill ward. The spectacle of a man with a terror conviction campaigning on a platform of Palestinian solidarity while dismissing his past as youthful ‘mistakes’ has understandably provoked outrage. From Birmingham to Gaza, the pattern is consistent: British institutions have developed a tolerance for terrorism and extremism But if Butt

The longest war of the twentieth century was between Iran and Iraq and lasted for eight years. Yet during those eight years, Iraq killed fewer Iranian civilians than the Islamic Republic has reportedly killed in the past two weeks. The regime’s security forces enter hospitals, not merely to arrest protesters, but to shoot them in the head. In the piles of bodies visible in the tragic videos circulating online, some corpses, with bullets in their heads, still have hospital monitors attached. This is a government at war with its own people. It is an occupying force that does not see Iranians as citizens, but as expendable sacrifices for the larger goal of spreading Islamic

The mullahs are learning – again – that one can beat a crowd, but not indefinitely beat a people. A state founded on permanent emergency eventually discovers that emergency is its only language, and coercion cannot persuade forever. The protests convulsing Iran, met with familiar brutality, are not just street politics. They are a referendum on clerical rule, the terror apparatus sustaining it, and the international indulgence keeping it alive. Britain’s complacency in the face of Tehran’s terror isn’t naïve; it’s strategic self-harm Britain’s response to foreign despotism is tepid: ‘urge restraint,’ ‘call for calm,’ ‘monitor closely.’ As Tehran accelerates punishments and enforcers hunt the defiant, Westminster persists in therapeutic

When authoritarian regimes start to wobble, outside observers often reach instinctively for the single, familiar idea of ‘the alternative’. It is a human reflex, but a dangerous one. In Iran, as the clerical theocracy shows signs of fracture and the country’s crisis deepens, some Western voices have begun to flirt with a thought that feels neat and historically legible: the return of the Shah’s son. That would be a profound mistake. Iran doesn’t need a restoration Iran’s tragedy since 1979 has been that an autocracy was replaced by another autocracy. The lesson should be plain: changing the personality at the top is not enough. What matters is the nature of

An Iranian friend of mine once told me that ever since fleeing his homeland in the early days of Iran’s Islamic Republic, his grandfather had kept a packed suitcase by his front door, awaiting the day he may return. Alas, in his case, that day never came: the old man was buried before he could ever revisit the places and people he most cherished. As a new wave of protests sweeps through Iran, nearly 47 years since the establishment of the current regime, once more I, and many other lovers of Iran but despisers of the Islamic Republic, find ourselves daring to hope again. Or, at least, hoping to dare