Iran’s nuclear program exposes Western hypocrisy

Latheef FAROOK

On September 21, Iran announced its second uranium enrichment facility stating that the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA was informed as early as 2004 of it. It is being built into the side of a mountain at the holy city of Qom making it less vulnerable to destruction, even with the latest bunker-busting U.S. bombs, to ensure nuclear activities continue uninterrupted in the event of a military strike.

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad facing the threats

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country is ready to let the IAEA inspectors inspect the new facilities and time and again the IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei said Iran was ‘on the wrong side of the law’ and he had seen “no credible evidence” of developing nuclear weapons”. This comes in the wake of demands and threats by hawks in America backed by Britain, France and Israel, for a military strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. In the forefront of this vicious campaign has been Israel, the sole nuclear power in the Middle East that remains the sole source of war, death, destruction, tension, instability and misery in the region.

Reacting swiftly

In the midst came Iran’s test firing of medium- and long-range missiles. Reacting swiftly as if Iran has declared war on the West, President Barack Obama, along with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, accused Iran of building a secret nuclear fuel plant. French President Sarkozy warned that Europe and the United States would tighten sanctions against Iran unless it halted its nuclear program.

These threats were followed by the visit of El Baradi to Tehran where he announced last Sunday that IAEA inspectors would visit Iran’s newly disclosed uranium processing plant on October 25 and called on Iran to assure the world it was not building a bomb.

“The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, Russia has about the same, Britain and France had several hundred. Israel, having one of the most sophisticated nuclear arsenals in the world, refused to sign the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, NPT, which seeks to limit the spread of such weapons of mass destruction.

However, there was hardly a reference to Israel’s secret nuclear weapons. Instead, rewarding Israel, President Obama has given an assurance during his recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel would not be pressured into accounting for its nuclear arsenal or signing the NPT, thus allowing Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections, The Washington Times, quoting officials familiar with the matter, reported on Friday that President Obama also guaranteed that the White House would continue its four decade-old secret deal with the Zionist state.

Israel maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity and the tacit agreement prolonged the nuclear understanding reached between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969.

Saying what all the world leaders wanted to say but were afraid to, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned Western countries’ focus on Iran’s nuclear program and stressed that the world should deal with Israel’s nuclear weapons that used “phosphorous bombs” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

What is the reason for this double standard? Why are world leaders so reluctant to open Israel’s nuclear arsenal up to discussion, whereas Iran’s ambiguous ambitions are occupying the floor in the UN? The answer lies in Israel’s successful public diplomacy tactics.

Abhorrent image

Israel has the backing of the strongest lobbying groups in the US and the European capitals. It has the advantage of using the media to create a favorable image of itself and an abhorrent image of Iran and other “enemies” of Israel.

It has the advantage of the “Holocaust shame” of the Western world. It has the pretext of being able to claim “existential threat.”

Apart from the Holocaust, none of these advantages was natural-born advantages of being Jewish and the sole home of the Jewish people in the world. Even the “Holocaust shame” of the Christian West is a product of years of propaganda.

Iran, as one of the original signatories of the NPT, has been a consistent advocate of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. In contrast, Israel has never agreed to an IAEA inspection, and its nuclear weapons plant at Dimona remains an open secret. Israel “deplores” UN resolutions calling on it to sign the NPT, just as it deplored the recent UN report charging it with crimes against humanity in Gaza. Just as it maintains a world record for violations of international law, it gets away with this because the powers that be grants it immunity.

The atmosphere is somewhere similar to the time in 2001 when the US led west unleashed a fierce campaign to justify the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, an almost developed country that was turned into a wasteland.

Western media, an integral part of the Western war machine, manufactured lies to mislead the world.

Justifying the designs

They are doing the same thing to justify their designs on Iran, the only country in the region that refused to bow down to the dictates of the unholy Anglo-American -Israeli trinity unlike their counterparts in the Middle East.

The media screamed with head lines such as “Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant”. “The clock ticking”, “Good versus evil”, “Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq”, “Iranian plan to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq” by September of that year - a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction. The weapons industry remains an integral part of the US, UK, France and Israel. They need wars to ensure the weapons industry flourishes. Politicians implement the evil designs of the weapons industry and the so-called Western free media whose freedom ends when it comes to holocaust and criticizing Jewish crime, manufacture lies to mislead the world to justify wars.

The name of the game remains the same - toe the line or face destruction- whoever be at the helm- be it George Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Jacques Chirac, Ehud Olmert or Benjamin Netanyahu. The goal is to control the “strategic prize” of the gas and oilfields of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia, the Gulf and Iran - in other words, Eurasia. Innocent people all over the world pay the price with their flesh, bloods, lives and their natural resources.