Iran

It isn’t just Iran who have been angered by the execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Protests have erupted in Bahrain, Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq, all places where the 1400-year-old Shia-Sunni divide remains a faultline. Iran’s reaction may seem uncompromising, with Ayatollah Khamenei tweeting: ‘The unjustly spilt blood of this martyr will have quick consequences’; but they have also sounded a note of caution. President Rouhani called for the arrest of the mob who stormed the Saudi embassy buildings. Perhaps he knows that, in the long run, Iran’s star is rising and the Saudis’ is falling.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3" title="Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next" startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world.

When the Iran nuclear deal was debated in Washington, the popular Iranian chant 'Death to America!' was a regular point of contention. According to the New Yorker, on one occasion the Texan republican Ted Poe asked John Kerry if the slogan meant that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted to destroy the United States: 'I don't believe they've said that,' the Secretary of State replied. 'I think they've said 'Death to America' in their chants.' 'Well, I kind of take that to mean that they want us dead,' Poe quipped. So happily today, Khamenei has stepped in to clarify just what is meant by the now infamous chant, which first arose in 1979 at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution.

Earlier this week I asked where the celebrated ‘Ummah’ is when it comes to Muslim refugees. I think we now have an answer. Here is a video of one Kuwaiti official’s response to the question of why none of the Gulf countries seem willing to take any Syrian refugees. ‘Kuwait and the other Gulf Cooperation Council countries are too valuable to accept any refugees. Our countries are only fit for workers. It’s too costly to accept them here. Kuwait is too expensive for them anyway. As opposed to Lebanon and Turkey which are cheap. They are better suited for the Syrian refugees. ‘In the end it is not right for us to accept a people that are different from us. We don’t want people that suffer from internal stress and trauma in our country.

I have just returned from a trip abroad to find Britain and Europe in a state of madness. I will not reflect on any connections between these events. But perhaps a reader could enlighten me as to why in recent days Britain and Europe appear to have decided that Syria's refugees are entirely 'our' responsibility. Other than a generalised sense that we are all human beings, Europeans are about as far down the list of those responsible as it is possible to be. Neither this country nor any of our European allies have made any significant intervention in Syria's civil war. So why should Hungarians and Slovakians, Austrians and Poles be expected to bear such a significant responsibility for this?

Iran uses cranes to hang citizens for offences such as 'waging war against God' and 'crimes against chastity'. These cranes are often made in Europe. Now, with sanctions against the Iranian regime lifted, European companies are are clamouring to get back into the Iranian market. The CEO of the Austrian construction giant Palfinger last week called Iran a 'promising market'. But after a human rights group in Vienna released a photograph of an Iranian dangling from a Palfinger crane, the company quickly backtracked on that statement. As Amnesty International noted last month, 'Iranian authorities are believed to have executed an astonishing 694 people between 1 January and 15 July 2015.' The number is expected to climb to more than 1,000 by year’s end.

President Obama has accused critics of the recently announced deal with Iran of having no credible alternative. According to Obama, it was this deal or no deal. And then, alleges the president, the options are either acquiescence or war. But this is a false choice, set up by the Obama administration to make its bad deal look like the best we ever could have hoped for. Yet, the truth is that the alternative to this deal was not no deal, it was a better deal, one that actually met the international community’s objectives in undertaking negotiations in the first place. The Iran deal presented at Vienna is both weak and also far more dangerous than most observers had anticipated.