At the height of the protests in Iran earlier this month, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper informed the public that her government had summoned Iranian Ambassador Seyed Ali Mousavi “to underline the gravity of this moment and to call on Iran to answer for the horrific reports that we are hearing.” Indeed, the moment was deemed so grave as to warrant a highly animated speech by Cooper in Parliament, quite unlike her speeches on Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which had been extremely evasive and equally dull. Tzipi Hotovely, who was Israel’s ambassador to Britain until very recently, had never been summoned either, despite all the “horrific reports” we have heard over the last couple of years. In fact, Hotovely had the good fortune of posing with Cooper on multiple occasions. In the pictures, she looked animated too – at least as animated as Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage, who personally joined the “protesters” in London against the Iranian government.
For a man otherwise known to be allergic to foreign flags, Farage seemed rather happy when surrounded by a swarm of Pahlavi Iran flags, alongside a few Israeli ones, as usual. So happy was he, in fact, that he almost broke into tears. At this point, it would surely be absurd to entertain the notion that the mainstream push for regime change in Iran is coming from a good place, or out of concern for “democracy,” however elusive. The destruction of Iran as a “threat” (read: a stable state) appears to be the ultimate objective.
Yet some people who really should know better seem to feel that their otherwise commendable warnings against a U.S.-Israeli plot to destroy Iran must always be accompanied by a banal condemnation of the targeted government on “humanitarian” grounds. This includes European liberals, as well as certain sectors of Iran’s neighbors who have long been led to see Iran as their number one enemy. How this came about is a wholly different story, requiring extensive analysis, for which space is not available in the present article. The important thing to note here is how Iran’s neighbors are responding today, and here we see an improvement in geopolitical awareness. Saudi Arabia’s evolving position is a testament to this.
Meanwhile, those who have been pushing strongly for a regime-change war in Iran seem to have discovered a newfound concern for the safety and well-being of the Kurdish people in Syria. They launched a vicious lobbying campaign against what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described as “the radical Sunni axis,” as they had already done against the “Iranian Shiite radical axis.” What these two axes have in common is simply that they are “axes,” and therefore must be punished by the “allies.” After all, history teaches us this lesson.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many European liberals agree, at least in practice, with Netanyahu and his most fanatical supporters in the U.S. not only on Iran, but also on the fate of the Kurdish people in Syria. On these policies, they do not mind being aligned with the most aggressive elements of the current American government, which have been as hostile as it gets to the “interests” of Europe, demonstrated most notably in the case of Greenland. Their late realization that the empire might not be a reliable “partner” is apparently not sufficient to dissuade them from collaborating with its most aggressive elements in essentially promoting death and destruction.
Even those on the far left who would normally be disgusted by the hypocritical behavior of these liberals seem to inadvertently align themselves with extremely hawkish figures such as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been tirelessly lobbying against Türkiye, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all in the interests of Israel. Their “anti-imperialism” appears to be outdated, to say the least, for the YPG terrorist group is certainly not a Soviet satellite fighting against American imperialism, as they likely imagine it to be. In fact, functionally, it is to the Kurdish people in Syria what the so-called “Crown Prince” Reza Pahlavi is to the Iranian people. In other words, it serves not the people that it claims to represent, but those who see those people really as subhumans who could be easily disposed of whenever convenient.
