Something strange is going on. Why is the EU so keen to shoe-horn America back into the nuclear deal with Iran? Former US president Donald Trump ditched the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal three years ago and imposed heavy sanctions on the mullahs’ regime under his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Since then, the Iranians have boasted about how they have flouted the terms of the deal by accelerating their advanced centrifuge program and enriching uranium to almost weapons grade fissile status. The Biden administration is being ultra-cautious. But the EU’s high Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security, the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell, told a news conference in the Qatari capital Doha on Sept. 30 that “talks would resume soon.” Borrell said he believed the negotiations aimed at bringing back Tehran and Washington into full compliance with the agreement will begin again "within an acceptable period of time."
A spokesman for the Iranian regime, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said that the mullahs would not "waste an hour before returning to Vienna talks once a re-evaluation of the sixth round of the nuclear talks" is completed by the new government of Ebrahim Raisi, the so-called ‘butcher of Tehran.’ Raisi is notorious for his key role in the 1988 massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners. He is demanding that all sanctions be lifted before talks on the nuclear deal can resume. Khatibzadeh declared aggressively, "The Biden administration should finally make a decision: either it wants to preserve Trump's legacy, or it wants to build Biden's. This is a purely political decision.”
Josep Borrell appears ready to bend over backwards to get the Vienna talks underway again. Nothing the Iranian regime does seems to faze him. The fact that an accredited Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, flew from Tehran to Vienna on a commercial airliner with a fully primed 500 gm bomb in his diplomatic pouch, does not seem relevant to Borrell. When Assadi and three co-conspirators were sentenced to decades of imprisonment by a Belgian Court for attempting to kill and maim potentially hundreds of people at an Iranian opposition rally near Paris, attended by many prominent Western political figures, Borrell refused to expel Iran’s ambassador or even issue a critical comment. When a British and a Romanian national were killed in an Iranian drone strike on an Israel-operated oil tanker in the Arabian sea in July, again Borrell made no comment.
While Iran pours money and troops into Syria to back Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war, Borrell says nothing. When the mullahs provide the Houthi rebels in Yemen with money and missiles, he refuses to condemn them. When the Iranian regime sponsors and commands the brutal militias in Iraq and provides limitless support for the terrorist Hezbollah organization in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, Borrell remains silent. Like the three wise monkeys, Borrell sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. He will crawl to the Iranian regime. As the top EU diplomat responsible for the security of European citizens, he is not fit for purpose and should be fired.
Borrell clearly knows that the JCPOA nuclear deal was a grave error from day one. It forbade inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from inspecting any sites controlled by the military inside Iran. Virtually all the theocratic regime’s secret nuclear program was being developed in military sites, so the deal was fatally flawed. And yet Borrell is desperate to see the talks resume, even if it means lifting sanctions, kick-starting the mullahs’ economy and bankrolling them once again with cash to fund their proxy wars and terrorist activities throughout the Middle East and worldwide and to continue their savage repression at home.
The sham election of Ebrahim Raisi was the last straw for most civilized Europeans who value human rights and justice, but not for Borrell. He even sent his deputy, Enrique Mora to Tehran, to attend Raisi’s inauguration as president on Aug. 5. With Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even the UN calling for Raisi to be held to account for his involvement in murder and genocide, Europeans could have expected the EU to boycott the ceremony in Tehran. Now the highest federal court in Switzerland has concluded that the assassination of Kazem Rajavi in Geneva in 1990 by the mullahs, was a crime against humanity and genocide, due to its direct link to the 1988 massacre of political prisoners who were mainly supporters of the Peoples Mojahedin of Iran/ Mojahedin e-Khalq (PMOI/MEK), based on a fatwa by the regime’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The Swiss federal court found that to plan the assassination of Rajavi, a key figure in the PMOI/MEK, Iranian commandos travelled to Switzerland three times between October 1989 and April 1990. During the last trip, the commandos, comprising 13 people with Iranian service passports marked "chargé de mission," monitored the victim for several days before killing him on April 24, 1990. They then fled to Tehran. The Swiss court’s ruling reinforces the clear conclusion that the Iranian regime is a criminal enterprise engaged in genocide and led by a murderer, with whom the EU should have no dealings whatsoever. The accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity have now been reinforced by the ongoing trial in Sweden of one of Raisi’s functionaries, Hamid Noury, who helped with the 1988 executions. He was arrested in Sweden for war crimes and for his involvement in the 1988 massacre. Survivors of the massacre have been telling the Stockholm court how Raisi contentedly munched cakes while handing out hundreds of arbitrary death sentences after three-minute hearings. The sickening evidence in Stockholm has left many scratching their heads in disbelief that Europe’s top diplomat insists on continuing any kind of dialogue with this murderous, criminal regime and its terrorist godfather.
Borrell cannot be allowed to continue with his dangerous and delusional attempts to appease Raisi and his criminal gang. The JCPOA is dead in the water and the time has come to sack Borrell, abandon useless dialogue with the Iranian regime and restore Europe’s credibility by indicting Ebrahim Raisi and his cronies for crimes against humanity and genocide. Nothing less will do.