Europe: Legitimizes Iran's Regime

Europe: Trying to Legitimize Iran's Regime

by Giulio Meotti

• "The E.U. only seems to care about the nuclear agreement and trade ties. It pretends that the regime is legitimate and that Iranians have no alternatives to living under tyranny". — Alireza Nader of New Iran, reported by Benjamin Weinthal, Fox News.
  
  
• "The fact that the Ayatollah had executed thousands of people, including many writers and poets since his seizure of power in Tehran had provoked only mild rebuke from Western governments and public opinion... With the fatwa against Rushdie, we thought the whole world would mobilise against the ayatollah, turning his regime into an international pariah. Nothing of the kind happened". — Amir Taheri, former executive editor-in-chief of Iran's leading newspaper, Kayhan.
  
  
• Worst of all, now Europe's highest court has effectively adopted Khomeini's idea of blasphemy. The European Court of Human Rights recently decided that an Austrian woman's conviction for calling the Prophet of Islam "a pedophile" did not breach her freedom of speech. The sharia style of "blasphemy" has now become a potent weapon to stifle and suppress free speech.
  
  
  
  

We are now witnessing, again, "The West's betrayal of Iranian dissidents". Iran last year arrested more than 7,000 people in a crackdown on dissidents, protesters, students, journalists, lawyers, women's rights activists and unionists, according to Amnesty International. The human rights group called the crackdown "a shameless campaign of repression". According to new documents leaked to the media monitoring group Reporters Without Borders, the Iranian regime imprisoned or executed at least 860 journalists in the three decades between the Islamic revolution in 1979 and 2009.

"The file is a register of all the arrests, imprisonments and executions carried out by the Iranian authorities in the Tehran area over three decades", Reporters Without Borders wrote. The documents added to record of the 61,900 political prisoners who had been held since the 1980s, as well as evidence of a massacre in 1988 in which 4,000 political prisoners were executed on the orders of Khomeini. According to human rights campaigner Geoffrey Robertson:

"Revolutionary guards descended on the prisons and a 'death committee' (an Islamic judge, a revolutionary prosecutor and an intelligence ministry official) took a minute or so to identify each prisoner, declare them mohareb [enemy of God] and direct them to the gallows erected in the prison auditorium, where they were hanged six at a time".

Why has Europe never tried to hold Iran accountable for these mass murders, which are believed to have been ordered by Khomeini on a death list denounced by Reporters Without Borders?

Last December, in another violent crackdown, Iran arrested more than 100 Christians. Many of the detainees were Muslims who converted to Christianity, and were accused of "proselytising". Iran is also number 9 on the Open Doors' world blacklist of countries persecuting Christians. Why has Europe, which so often claims to cherish religious freedom, never protested against Iran's persecution of its Christian minority?