FREE IRAN GLOBAL SUMMIT
CALL FOR JUSTICE
IRAN REGIME’S TERRORISM
Shut Down Tehran’s Embassies Abroad
SPEECH by STRUAN STEVENSON
Monday 20th July 2020 18.00-21.00 hrs
Good evening Madame President, Maryam Rajavi and good evening to my dear brothers and sisters in Ashraf 3. My warmest greetings to you all and especially to the courageous resistance units in Iran. It is a great privilege to speak to you this evening.
Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’ only lasted 12 years. On that basis, the Iranian regime is well past its sell-by-date. The 1979 revolution in Iran, which overthrew the despotic rule of the Shah, was quickly hi-jacked by the mullahs and their psychotic figurehead, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini appointed himself as God’s representative on earth, changing Iranian society overnight and giving birth to what is now known as Islamic fundamentalism.
Khomeini’s legacy of repression and corruption has been steadfastly maintained ever since. For the past 41 years the mullahs’ revolutionary creed of radicalised Islam in reality boils down to a policy of hatred. Hatred of the West and in particular America, a hatred of Sunnis, a visceral hatred of Saudi Arabia and Israel and a hatred of religious minorities of any kind.
To achieve their constitutional objective of spreading revolution to create a fundamentalist Shi’ite caliphate, the clerical regime has vigorously backed Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war in Syria; it has trained, financed and commanded the brutal Shi’ia militias in Iraq; it has sponsored the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen; it has bankrolled and inspired the export of proxy-wars and terror throughout the Middle East and the wider world. Every country the mullahs have targeted is now a smoking ruin. Founded on hatred, this theocratic fascist dictatorship has wrecked the Iranian economy, plundered the people’s wealth, ruined the environment and turned this once great nation into an international pariah.
Deploying their Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – the regime’s Gestapo, the mullahs have unleashed a homicidal blitz on their own population, crushing dissent, wantonly murdering and maiming thousands of peaceful protesters. Iran’s jails are bursting at the seams with political prisoners, many of them young students, male and female, arrested during the most recent nationwide uprising in November 2019.
The main targets for arrest, torture and execution are supporters of the principal opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin of Iran PMOI and their families. Over the past four decades, 120,000 of its members and supporters have been executed. Dozens more have been assassinated outside of Iran. The latest wave of arrests and hard prison sentences for PMOI supporters and their families has laid bare the mullahs’ fear of the people, who are now seething with rage at their criminal rulers. Iran has become a dangerous powder-keg, ready to explode.
Last week the trial began in Belgium of Assadollah Assadi, a diplomat from the Iranian Embassy in Vienna. It is the first time in European history that a diplomat has been tried for acts of terrorism. Assadi was filmed handing over 500gms of high explosives and a detonator to an Iranian couple from Antwerp, ordering them to bomb our great annual gathering at Villepinte near Paris in June 2018. He and his co-conspirators have been in jail for the past 2 years awaiting trial. But the question has to be asked. Who gave Assadi the orders to bomb the NCRI gathering?
As Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif is in charge of Iran’s army of ambassadors and diplomatic staff. In June 2018, he was therefore responsible for the orders given to Assadollah Assadi. And this was not the only plot involving his diplomatic staff. Albanian intelligence officers uncovered a plan to detonate a bomb at a Nowruz gathering of PMOI members in Tirana. Two MOIS agents, together with the Iranian Ambassador and First Secretary, were expelled from the country by the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. But even Zarif could not have given the order to carry out such terror attacks without the consent and approval of Rouhani and the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. All of them must now be held to account. All of them must be indicted for acts of terror and tried before the international criminal courts, and all of the mullahs’ embassies, which they use as bomb factories and launch pads for terror attacks, must be immediately closed.
Their terrorist attacks on the NCRI and the PMOI go right to heart of the media as well. The regime is so frightened by the truth of the PMOI's popularity inside Iran that it goes crazy if it sees any positive media coverage. Following last Friday’s huge global gathering, Mrs Rajavi’s speech was broadcast live on Iran International TV.
The mullahs went mad. They ordered their agents and lobbyists around the world to bully TV channels. Freedom of the press is meaningless to the mullahs. They cannot stand the thought of Mrs Rajavi, who is respected as a leader in Iran, to be seen or heard on television. They spewed out insults and abusive language on social media. They recognize no right for the media to decide on what they should show or who they should interview.
Disgracefully, some newspapers and TV channels, like Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Algemeine, the Guardian and Channel 4 News, have been seduced by the regime’s demonization campaign. But I encourage the press to take their journalistic principles seriously and as my colleague David Jones said in the gathering last Friday, "Today, we want the BBC to open its air waves not to the mullahs but to the Iranian speakers and convey the spirit of the Iranian Resistance. This is what the British people and their cross-party representatives in the UK Parliament want to see happen.”
The time has come to pull down the curtain on this murderous regime. After 41 years of tyranny, the Iranian regime’s sell by date has expired. The mullahs and their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have earned their place in the trash can of history alongside Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and every other failed tyrant. It is time to say goodbye and good riddance.
