It was recently revealed that Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin had advised former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar not to sign an open letter in support of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) the main democratic opposition movement to the mullahs’ theocratic regime. At first glance, this appeared to be a strange request from the Foreign Minister. Mr. Varadkar had received an email from the ‘In Search of Justice’ (ISJ) organization asking him to sign “an open letter by former world leaders expressing solidarity with the Iranian people's aspirations for freedom and democracy.” Last November, the Iranian regime attempted to assassinate me outside my home in Madrid. Miraculously, I survived despite being shot in the head. The Spanish police have now arrested 9 suspects associated with the crime, and all indications are that the Iranian regime planned, financed, and outsourced the assassination in an attempt to silence me as president of the ISJ, one of their foremost critics and the person on top of the mullahs’ blacklist.
The attempt on my life follows a pattern of similar terrorist outrages sponsored by the Iranian regime. In 2018, an Iranian diplomat from the regime’s embassy in Vienna, Assadollah Assadi, was arrested after handing a professionally made bomb to three co-conspirators with instructions to detonate it at a major Iranian opposition rally near Paris. The rally was attended by over 100,000 ex-pat Iranians and senior international political figures. Hundreds would have been killed and maimed had the bomb exploded. A Belgian court sentenced Assadi to 20 years imprisonment on terrorist charges.
In response, the mullahs seized a young Belgian charity worker - Olivier Vandecasteele, accusing him of spying and sentencing him to 40 years imprisonment and 74 lashes. Tehran uses the tactic of hostage-taking to negotiate the release of their terrorists, and in this case, the Belgian government, disgracefully, caved in. Assadi returned to a hero’s welcome in Tehran. Indeed, Ireland has also suffered hostage diplomacy at the hands of the mullahs. Bernard Phelan, a 64-year-old Irish/French national originally from Clonmel in Co Tipperary, was sentenced to six and a half years in jail on trumped-up spying charges after being arrested in Mashhad in October 2022. When he became seriously ill in prison, Mr Phelan was released last year, following the intervention of the French government and of Tánaiste Micheál Martin.
It is troubling that despite recognizing the criminal terrorist and hostage-taking tactics of the mullahs’ regime, Micheál Martin should nevertheless go out of his way to stop Leo Varadkar from signing a letter supporting the Iranian people and their main opposition movement. However, the dust began to settle last week when Taoiseach Simon Harris defended his government’s decision to reopen the Irish embassy in Tehran. It is abundantly clear that Micheál Martin’s craven act of appeasement was aimed at placating the mullahs and furthering his ambition to install Laoise Moore as Ireland’s Ambassador. Ms. Moore has been in Tehran for the past month but has not yet been offered a date to present her credentials to Iranian officials formally.
Such spineless attempts to appease the mullahs have been repeated again and again for decades, each time with a renewed hope that Western acquiescence would lead to a change in the regime’s belligerent behavior. It has never worked. Indeed, such pusillanimous performances have emboldened the regime, encouraging more terrorism, more hostage-taking, and more regional conflict throughout the Middle East. The Iranian regime backs Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. Tehran is the head of the snake. They have formed a so-called Axis of Resistance with Russia, North Korea, and Venezuela, defying Western sanctions to supply their proxy forces with weapons, training, and finance. Western governments should be backing the millions of Iranians who have taken to the streets in repeated nationwide uprisings to demand regime change. We should be closing our embassies in Tehran and expelling Iranian diplomats from Europe, where they use their embassies as bomb factories and terror hubs.
Ever determined to look for a pearl in the rotting oyster of the Islamic Republic, Western political leaders like Micheál Martin cling to the hope that the newly installed Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is some sort of ‘moderate’ and ‘reformist,’ ignoring the fact that 342 people, including 13 women, have been executed since he took office less than three months ago. Now that Canada has followed America’s lead in blacklisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s Gestapo, and the EU is considering doing the same, it is time for Ireland to wake up and heed the words of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who said: “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot but make it hot by striking.” Now is the time for strict action against this evil regime, not for cowardly submission.