Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Bravo Canada!



A timely and long overdue article from a Canadian who believes his government should sever all ties with the Islamic Republic and do everything in its power to expose the atrocities of the regime. It was written in response to accusations from Iran that the Canadian embassy in Iran was a den of spies. Below are a few lines from the article:

I hope the Canadian embassy in Tehran does, indeed, represent a "den of spies," as Iranian hard-liner Hamidreza Hajbabai asserted. That would be fine with me. And should it be true, I believe our foreign affairs representatives should continue to lie about it. We do not owe Tehran transparency.

I can think of few better regimes to spy on, than one that tortured and beat one of our citizens to death, one whose president denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and one that refuses to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

This is not to mention its undermining of the fledgling democracies of Lebanon and Iraq and a human-rights record that could generously be described as appalling.

I can also think of few better regimes for us to fully sever our diplomatic ties with, something we should have done after the death of Zahra Kazemi. Or if not at that time, then certainly after evidence and testimony verified she had been tortured, and that Iranian justice was unwilling to confront the perpetrators.



Had it any moral fibre, the Canadian government would have done more than simply announce, as it did on our foreign affairs website in 2005, that it was "tightening" its "policy of controlled engagement." Kazemi's son has been, consistently, a far better spokesperson for his mother than anyone in Ottawa, and that is to this country's discredit.


2 comments:

Michael said...

It's not just Canada that needs to close down its Tehran embassy; the entire civilized world needs to follow suit.

There is no point in talking to regimes like those in Tehran, or Damascus, or Gaza City, or North Korea, or Sudan (and the list can go on and on).

We shoot mad dogs, don't we?

SERENDIP said...

michael: I couldn't agree more. I'm so sick of EU being the IRI's largest trade partner.