by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The Islamic Republic and its ‘Axis of Resistance’ are victims of their own suicidal lunacy.
Not even three years ago, paid goons of the Islamic Republic murdered a 13-year-old British girl. They bashed their way into the room in which she had scrabbled for sanctuary with her mother and sister and shot her to death. They then set a fire, reducing the girl to ash. She could only be identified by her dental records. The tyrants in Tehran celebrated. They marshalled their supporters on to the streets to sing and dance over this orgy of violence that entailed the merciless slaying of a British innocent. It’s a ‘turning point in history’, they crowed, as reporters were in the girl’s blackened home, holding their noses against the stench of death.
Her name was Yahel Sharabi. And I intend to say it to every fellow Briton who says the crisis in the Middle East ‘has nothing to do with us’. And to every slack-jawed Labour minister twiddling awkwardly with their ties as one of the great geopolitical emergencies of our time swirls all around them. And to every keffiyeh-smothered smug leftist who is currently painting the Islamic Republic as the innocent victim of an ‘unprovoked war of aggression’. Was the killing and immolation of a British girl not a provocation? Was the murder of her in the arms of her mother and sister – who were also killed – not an act of aggression? Was the slaying that day of a thousand others who were guilty of the same crime as young Yahel – they were Jews – not war?