Why hasn’t the UK outlawed the IRGC?

As the scale and barbarity of the Hamas terrorist assault on Israel begins to unfold, to no-one’s surprise Iran has leant its formal support to the insurgents. While thousands of rockets rain down on Israeli civilians and and Iran’s proxies pull men women and children out of their homes — murdering them in the streets — it’s worth remembering that the United Kingdom still has not proscribed that regime’s state terror exporters, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.  

Whether it is terror funding and training to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the occupied territories, the IRGC is inextricably linked to today’s butchery. This is the same state organ that is responsible for the grotesque human rights violations of Iranian women who refuse to bow to its repressive medieval worldview. For over four decades the IRGC has been exporting violent extremism around the world and propagating the toxic ideology that animates its exponents. It is committed to the destruction of the state of Israel in its founding constitution and relentlessly involved in radicalisation. 

Perhaps the bloodied facts on the ground will move the United Kingdom to finally joining with the United States, Sweden and other countries in designating these murderous fanatics as a foreign terrorist organisation. Certainly the arguments against this look increasingly feeble in the light of today’s assault where the objective was to murder and terrorise as many Jews as possible.

In March this year, the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, boasted of the $70 million sent by Iran to his insurgents to finance ‘missiles.’ An estimated 5,000 of those weapons were launched ahead of Hamas penetration of the Gaza border fence this morning. Those terrorists were later seen marauding through Israeli towns close to the frontier apparently murdering civilians with complete impunity. The video footage on display on social media includes the desecration of the dead by baying mobs of gunmen. It is hard therefore to see why the UK still believes that not outlawing the IRGC preserves some sort of diplomatic leverage. How can you negotiate with theocratic fascists so utterly devoid of humanity?

It’s becoming clearer that Biden’s capitulation in Afghanistan and the unfreezing of $6 billion of assets in the hopelessly one-sided prisoner swap deal just last month have emboldened the regime. Their primary military objective remains the development of nuclear weapons. Their primary diplomatic objective is to undermine the Abraham Accords. This is the historic agreement to normalise relations between Arab countries and Israel — and that threatens to make redundant the Iranian regime’s bleak ideology of a forever war with the ‘Zionist entity’.  

We must now make it clear that the IRGC is a terrorist endeavour and there will be no further pretence that it is amenable to diplomatic persuasion. If there is hesitancy to do so because the IRGC is effectively the same as the Iranian regime, then we must make it plain that the Islamic Republic of Iran — who brutalise their own citizens and export that brutality worldwide — is in itself a terrorist entity.  That export has reached the shores of the UK: the Islamic Students Association of Britain has reportedly hosted meetings with sanctioned apologists for the Khamenei regime steeped in antisemitic rhetoric that seeks to radicalise young people.

Israel is under attack now as it was exactly 50 years ago in an equally unforeseen and audacious assault on the feast of Yom Kippur. The dates are probably no coincidence. Today’s attack was underwritten by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Corps. It now supports and coordinates all terrorist organisations surrounding this tiny country. It continues to operate in plain sight in this country with feeble and insufficient control over its mission to poison the minds of students.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the UK government may proscribe an organisation if it is concerned in terrorism and it is proportionate to do so. Both of those tests have been met and exceeded by the horrors unleashed on Israeli civilians. One way we could stand in solidarity with a traumatised ally under murderous assault is deny any legitimacy or hiding place to the international gangsters who are bankrolling it. It is time to act in the name of global and national security.