It seems that hypocrisy has no limits in Tehran. Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president known as ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his bloodstained role as an executioner, has accused Israel of a “clear violation of international relations” following the Israeli airstrike that killed seven senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the consular annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The five-story building was completely flattened on April 1, when six missiles were allegedly fired from Israeli F-35 warplanes. Israel has refused to comment.
For Raisi to complain about the violation of international relations is particularly laughable, given the case of Assadollah Assadi, a registered diplomat from the Iranian embassy in Vienna, who, together with three Iranian co-conspirators, was arrested in Belgium on terrorist charges after being caught in June 2018 handing over a professionally constructed and fully primed TATP bomb and ordering his co-conspirators to detonate it at a huge Iranian opposition rally in Paris. Assadi was given the maximum sentence of 20 years and then shamefully released in a contrived prisoner-swap deal after the mullahs’ regime kidnapped a young Belgian charity worker and used him as a hostage to secure the release of their terrorist ‘hero’ who was welcomed home by Raisi himself.
As the leading global sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian regime is in no position to accuse any nation of breaching international regulations. The seven IRGC officers killed in the Israeli airstrike included two commanders of its extraterritorial Quds Force, Brigadier Generals Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, both described by the IRGC as “Iran’s senior military advisors in Syria.” Zahedi has for years been closely involved in coordinating attacks on Israeli and American targets in Syria and Lebanon and is the most senior IRGC/Quds force commander to be killed since the assassination of Qasem Soleimani by a US drone strike in Baghdad airport in January 2020. Soleimani was one of the most vicious criminals in Iran’s history. He was listed as a terrorist by the US State Department. Zahedi and Rahimi were cut from the same cloth and had the blood of thousands on their hands.
It is hardly surprising that the Israelis targeted the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The mullahs have made no secret of the way they use their embassies as bomb factories and terrorist control centres. In December 2018, the Iranian Ambassador and First Secretary in Tirana were declared personae non gratae by Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama and were expelled for endangering the security of the state by plotting bombings from within their embassy. Indeed, Iran’s blatant violation of international regulations extends even further, to the arming and training of Houthi rebels in Yemen by the IRGC and its Quds Force, showing them how to mount drone and missile attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, a situation that has escalated during the ongoing Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza, seriously disrupting international trade and causing the death of several innocent seamen. The Iranian regime’s role in planning, financing, training and arming the Hamas extremists from Gaza who attacked Israel on October 7 is also well documented, again involving the IRGC and its Quds Force. Indeed, the killing of three US military personnel in Jordan at the end of January by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq was yet another clear demonstration of the theocratic regime’s aptitude to mount violent operations on foreign soil, in barefaced breach of international norms.
In his hypocritical attack on Israel, Raisi went on to say: “After repeated defeats and failures against the faith and will of the Resistance Front fighters, the Zionist regime has put blind assassinations on its agenda in the struggle to save itself.” Raisi is, of course, an expert in such matters, having most recently commanded the attempted assassination of Dr. Alejo Vidal Quadras, a senior Spanish politician and former Vice President of the European Parliament. Dr Vidal Quadras is a long-time vociferous supporter of the Iranian opposition. On November 9 last year, two men on a motorcycle approached him as he walked through the Salamanca neighborhood in Madrid around midday. One of the men dismounted and shot Alejo in the face. Although seriously injured and hospitalized, fortunately Alejo survived. Although the hitmen have not yet been arrested, Spanish police and Alejo himself are certain that Tehran was behind the attempted assassination, which could only have been ordered and financed at the highest levels of government.
Raisi’s criticism of the Israeli airstrike in Damascus, coming from a president who supplies kamikaze drones to Vladimir Putin for use against Ukrainian civilian targets, and who’s regime has been a lifelong supporter of Hamas, training and financing its terrorist activities, wears a little thin. Raisi’s regime has pumped money, men and resources to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war in Syria and the brutal Shi’ia militias in Iraq for years, exporting terror and aggression across the Middle East and sponsoring terrorist attacks and assassinations in the West. A UN fact-finding mission has concluded that Raisi’s regime murdered, imprisoned, tortured and raped thousands who were arrested during nationwide protests that erupted following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Its brutal crackdown on the protests where more than 700 people were killed and over 30,000 arrested, amounted to crimes against humanity according to the UN. We don’t need lessons in morality from ‘The Butcher of Tehran’.