The report on life in Gaza just issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross six months after the brutal Israeli attacks which killed between 1,100 and 1,400 people makes bitter reading. According to the ICRC, there has been almost no improvement since the Israelis stopped their brutal onslaught. The daily round of killing may have stopped but Gazans are still condemned to living in a war zone. It remains a bombsite. Even if they had the money to rebuild their shattered homes and lives, they cannot get hold of the equipment.
The reopening of the Rafah checkpoint on the border with Egypt has slightly improved matters — some trucks with medical aid have got through but it is a tiny fraction of what is needed. Israel’s blockade of the strip remains devastatingly effective. Gaza is, as the ICRC report so horrifyingly points out, a state of despair. Imprisoned by the Israelis, still mourning the deaths of family and friends (there is hardly a family that did not lose someone), with woefully insufficient medical care, a destroyed economy, no hope of a job and living in what looks like an earthquake zone (the reports’ own words), there is a hopelessness that shocks.
A state of despair... facing, on the other side of the prison wires, a state of arrogance. For over 60 years now, the Israelis have treated the Palestinians with contempt and hatred. Time after time, the latter’s human rights are trampled over, their political aspirations crushed, UN resolutions ignored, international outrage scorned and efforts to mediate peace spurned.
It is not merely a state of arrogance, it is a state of insanity. The despair sown by the Israelis in Gaza breeds militancy and hatred. It breeds, too, a counter arrogance which displays itself in a refusal to countenance Palestinian-Israeli cohabitation, indeed to countenance anything other than Israel’s complete destruction.
The Israelis blockade Gaza to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas and to force its supporters from firing rockets at Israeli towns and settlement; it does the exact opposite. It fuels hatred of Israel. It ensures the rockets continue. It pushes the Gazans into the rejectionists’ embrace and creates a breeding ground for a fresh generations of bombers. Only a lunatic would claim that it is in Israel’s interests.
The cycle of oppression and misery has to be broken if Israel is to have the security it claims it wants. As a first step, it has to lift the restrictions and allow Gaza to start working and living again. Israel can never live in peace while it grinds the Gazans into the dust, while it keeps the territory as one giant prison whose inmates are forced to live in misery and squalor and humiliated daily. Nor should it.
The only way forward is the two-state solution proposed by the then Crown Prince and now Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and adopted by Arab states in 2002 and again revived at the Riyadh summit two years ago in which, in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from all lands occupied in 1967, Arab states would recognize it. The whole world understands that, including the U.S.; only the Israeli government baulks at the idea and consistently finds reasons to block it — which calls into question its claims it wants peace. It seems far more interested in wanting mastery — brutal mastery if necessary — over the Palestinians.
Gaza seems proof of that.
The affable Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has no qualm about criticising Iran's mullah's "problem of credibility" in light of the post-election street furor and, yet, one wonders if he can dodge the bullet of an incoming crisis over the mounting evidence of British complicity to engineer a regime change in Iran recently?The European Parliament, which has been quick to denounce Iranian authorities' heavy-hand with the peaceful protesters, should conduct a thorough investigation and, if need be, issue a stern censure of British government for violating Iran's sovereignty by, among other things, deliberately and through various questionable methods, trying to fuel the fire of a "velvet revolution" in Iran, undermining the Iranian government, supporting armed opposition groups, etc.
There is no doubt that all the elements of an "Iran inquiry" that could rival the still ongoing "Iraq inquiry" in London are already in place, except the political will to confront the facts instead of appeasing the government of Gordon Brown that is desperately seeking damage control for a bold, and ultimately foolish, gambit to cause a regime change or, at a minimum destabilize the nuclearizing Iran, that violated international law.
It is ironic that the European politicians who are exceeding themselves in support of rule of law and respect for human rights in Iran should turn a blind eye to the rogue behavior of the British government that has done everything possible to interfere in Iran's internal affairs. Such a double standard is untenable however and must be replaced with an enlightened response that is balanced and does not shy away from self-criticism.
The advantage of a European Parliament's official inquiry into Iran's allegations against British government is that it demonstrates the even-handedness of European lawmakers who must make clear to the British politicians that no matter what their justifications, their actions in Iran have been against the law and should not be repeated.
A full and impartial such inquiry would probe the following issues in tandem, which suggest a sinister regime change approach by London that has been abusive of the UN Charter and respect for Iran's national sovereignty, no matter how unpopular the results of the recent presidential elections in Iran:
* Evidence that the British forces in Afghanistan have provided training, arms and ammunition, including sophisticated to anti-regime ethnic terrorists;
* Evidence that the British government, which removed the MKO group from its terrorist list recently, has been in cohort with the MKO and may have supported the group's effort to dispatch its activists to Iran on the eve of the presidential election for the purpose of fomenting disorder;
* Evidence that at the height of the post-election crisis, the British government engaged in psychological warfare against Tehran by freezing Iran's bank assets, mainly to convey the impression of lack of international confidence in the regime's survivability;
* Evidence that the British government through the soft power of BBC and other means targetted Iran's supreme leader, in order to destabilize Iran by politically beheading Iran that is a prerequisite for regime change in Iran, and that concerted efforts to smear Iran's supreme leader went hand in hand with the anti--regime propaganda that filled the air on BBC and other British media outlets throughout the crisis;
* Evidence that instead of maintaining objective neutrality as called for by BBC's own guidelines, its correspondents covering the (post) election in Iran deliberately gave biased, one-sided coverage that in some instances was meant to agitate the population against the regime. A thorough and impartial review of BBC's coverage especially after the June 12 election is called for to ascertain the horrendous scope of BBC's complicity in triggering a velvet revolution in Iran;
* Evidence that the British Embassy in Iran both directly and indirectly engaged in unlawful and illicit contacts with the anti-government forces and provided moral and material support;
* Evidence that not content with the above-said efforts, the British government under the guise of "objective and scientific" studies by its foreign policy arms did it best to undermine the legitimacy of Iran's democratic process and to cast doubt on the fair election results.
In addition to the above-said, a European inquiry into this matter should also probe the "known unknown," that is, the distinct possibility of a concerted effort involving other governments, principally the U.S. and Israel, in pulling resources together via the window of opportunity afforded by Iran's presidential elections to destabilize Iran and, if possible, to cause a violent regime change.
This would mean, among other things, investigating the issue of mysterious murder of a young Iranian female by the name of Neda Soltani on June 20th, a day after Iran's supreme leader had warned against street agitations. Neda's cold-blooded murder may have been calculated to incite the passions and thus to trigger a violent reaction against the Iranian regime at a critical time in post-election. Regarding this matter, suffice to say that an Iranian expatriate doctor who works in Oxford, England, has been widely received in the British media and his accounts of his efforts to save Neda and his subsequent observations about a militiaman confessing that he shot Neda, etc., should be scrutinized for potential fraud due to the following:
* Contrary to Dr. Hejazi's claim that Neda died "in less than two minutes," other witnesses including her music teacher who took her to the hospital, have confirmed that Neda was still alive when she was rushed from the crime scene;
* Instead of accompanying the wounded Neda to hospital, Dr. Hejazi rushed to the internet to upload a video with a succinct description that cites his futile effort to save Neda who "died in less than a minute";
* At a minimum, Dr. Hejazi's failure to attend Neda until she was under medical care constitutes a case of medical malfeasance and this is an issue for official probe by the medical establishment in UK, as well as by British parliamentarians and media to determine if this is in any way connected to the suspicious circumstances of Neda's cold-blooded murder.
In conclusion, the failure of European Parliament to commence an independent probe of British government would, indeed, set a bad precedence as it would embolden the tortuous British government to repeat its unlawful activities against this and other Middle East regimes, that are branded as "rogue", in the future, when it is abundantly clear that there is no legal justification for the transgressive and violative rogue behavior of the British government cited above.
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