Published in the Jerusalem Post, 8 April 2024
On
the afternoon of Friday, 29 March, Pouria Zeraati was attacked by two men outside
his home in south London. Slashed again
and again with a knife, he suffered multiple stab wounds and was rushed to hospital. Fortunately he survived, and has since been
discharged.
Zeraati is
a journalist working for Iran International, a dissident TV news website
broadcasting from London. Established in
2017 it has, according to independent surveys, become the most
widely watched news channel in Iran, attracting twice as many viewers as BBC
Persian. It is, of course, banned by the
regime, and its audience has to access it via VPN, the virtual private network
system familiar to many viewers in Israel.
The
programs and interviews transmitted by Iran International are frank, and
outspokenly opposed to the Islamist regime and its excesses. Which is why
Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) has declared the station, along
with BBC Persian, a “terrorist channel”.
It was on March 8, 2023,
that Zaraati scored a media coup by persuading Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, to be interviewed on air.
Faced with the opportunity of addressing the Iranian public directly,
Netanyahu pulled no punches in his condemnation of the Iranian regime, its
leaders and its policies.
As he spoke Iran was in the throes
of nationwide political turmoil following the
death in police custody of Mahsa Amini the previous September. Amini had been arrested by the so-called
morality police. Her crime was allegedly
violating Iran's mandatory Islamic dress code through inappropriate use of her
hijab, or head covering.
News of her death
circulated rapidly on social media, and protests erupted at her funeral
and then spread across the country. The
government’s attempts to quell them had little effect. Many young women began appearing in public
without head coverings, and demonstrators, often led by women and young people,
targeted symbols of the Islamic Republic, burned pictures of Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and chanted "Death to the
Dictator".
During his TV interview Netanyahu
commended the stand taken by the women of Iran, asserting that by claiming
their right to freedom they were speaking for women the world over. The Iranian regime, he said, was the enemy of
freedom, while the brutal treatment of the women protesting for their freedom
had unmasked Iran’s leaders as the radical Islamist thugs they were.
He extended his
condemnation specifically to the IRGC who, he said, were actively engaged in
exporting terror across the world, and were even then heavily involved in plots
to assassinate elected officials, journalists, and any public figure openly
critical of the Iranian regime.
Netanyahu was almost
certainly aware that, as he spoke, London’s Metropolitan Police (the Met) were engaged
in countering threats to public security from Iranian agents operating in the
UK. This has since been confirmed in an
official announcement made on March 30, 2024.
“Counter-Terrorism Policing,” it ran, “continues to deal with threats
projected into the UK from Iran. Since 2022, a number of plots to either kidnap
or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the
Iranian regime have been disrupted.”
One such occurred back
in December 2023 when two Iranians, members of the IRGC, were found to be
involved in a plot to assassinate two TV presenters from Iran International,
and were sanctioned by both the British and US governments, acting
together. The journalists involved were
not identified at the time on security grounds.
Sanctions and warnings,
however, did nothing to deflect Tehran from its terrorist intent. Its IRGC
agents proceeded with its assassination attempt on Pouria Zeraati regardless, and the next day a news website
run by the IRGC said that Zeraati had incurred the state’s “wrath” for
conducting an interview with Israel’s prime minister. Under Zeraati’s questioning, Netanyahu’s
outright condemnation of the IRGC as the world’s foremost fomenter of terrorism
and tyranny could only have exacerbated the “wrath”. Media reports suggest that the knife plot was
a back-up scheme, after the initial idea of a car bomb outside the TV studio
was foiled by the presence of heavy security.
This was not the end of the affair. On March 30, Iranian journalist Sima Sabet revealed that she had been told by police to leave her home “until further notice”, because she was also an IRGC assassination target. Sabet hosted a talk show on Iran International, and previously worked for the BBC World Service. In a post on social media Sabet criticized the UK government for not standing up to terrorism perpetrated by the Iranian government.
“I must emphatically
mention,” she wrote, “that the British Government has not taken sufficient,
meaningful, decisive, and effective political action against the terrorism of
the Iranian government. As a journalist
and a British citizen, I cannot hide my criticism and concern over this
political and diplomatic negligence. Many of my journalist friends agree with
this assessment.”
She went on: “London is
our home. Britain must be a safe place for journalists across all media, and
unsafe for extremists and terrorists receiving orders from Tehran. Our voice
will not be silenced by threat and terrorism.
Journalism is not a crime; state terrorism is. Stop it.”
It is certainly true
that the UK’s Home Office has been humming and hawing for more than a year over
whether to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization – a BBC webpage,
posted on January 3, 2023 and still live, asserts that “the UK is preparing to
formally declare the Iran’s IRGC is a terrorist organization.“ Yet still no conclusion has been reached,
despite intense lobbying by members of parliament supportive of the government.
Some commentators held that
Britain’s Foreign Office believed that designating the IRGC would probably lead
to the expulsion of the British ambassador and jeopardize Britain’s capacity to
negotiate with Iran. However the current
sustained attacks on the world’s shipping by the Houthis, Iran’s agents, may
have put a different complexion on the issue, while the blatant attempt to
assassinate the journalist Zeraati on a London street could prove the
clincher. Time will tell.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-795824
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