The arrest of eight men – seven of them Iranian nationals – across the United Kingdom in two separate counter-terrorism operations is a chilling reminder that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a distant threat. It is here, embedded within our cities, probing the limits of our law, our patience and our willingness to defend our democratic integrity. Scotland Yard has revealed only sparse details: a suspected plot to target a ‘specific premises’, and a parallel but unrelated investigation into national security threats. But while the particulars remain classified, the pattern is anything but new. The Islamic Republic has waged a campaign of covert hostility against the UK, Europe and the United States for decades, deploying terrorism, assassination, cyberwarfare and hostage-taking as its sick tools of statecraft. Yet each plot disrupted, each life threatened, is not an isolated outrage but a symptom of a deeper malignancy – so when will we treat the disease, not just its fevers?
The West cannot continue to meet cruelty with abstraction, or terror with denial
This regime, forged in revolution and maintained through repression, has mastered the art of using terror for influence – from the bombing in 1994 of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people, to the IRGC’s alleged hiring in 2021 of a fugitive Hells Angels gang leader to orchestrate attacks on synagogues in Bochum and Essen in Germany.
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