Gearóid Ó Colmáin Offical site of journalist Gearóid Ó Colmáin.
( Picture above Hassan Abbasi and Gearóid Ó Colmáin in Tehran, 2017)
The recent US designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a “terrorist” organisation marks a new low in US foreign policy. Now the armed forces of another sovereign state have been declared illegal.
Iran has never attacked the United States. On the contrary, since the 1979 revolution, the country has been attacked several times by the United States. In 1980, the US forced Sadaam Husein to invade the country with a proxy army called the Mujahedeen Al Khalq. The Iran/Iraq war lasted for over 8 years. Iranians were gassed. The gas was sold to Iraq by French and German companies. No one was ever prosecuted. Former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper Udo Ulfkotte admitted lying to cover up his country’s complicity in crimes against humanity. It was his job; he was working for the CIA. Ulfkotte claimed most of the major news media in Europe were under the control of the CIA.
This latest act of aggression against Iran is intended to blacken its image around the world. The Western public is highly susceptible to mass propaganda. If the media can associate Iran with terrorism, it will legitimise US military intervention.
US terrorism against Iran
On the 3 July 1988, the US military shot down an Iranian passenger airliner flying in Iranian airspace. 248 Iranian civilians – 66 of whom were children — were murdered. The US military said it mistook the Airbus A300 for a military plane – in spite of the fact that military planes are two thirds smaller.
The US never apologised for that act of terrorism. Nor have they ever apologised for all the other acts of terrorism since. In 2017 I made a documentary with Press TV on the Iran/Iraq war. I visited many of the famous sites along the Iran/Iraq border where the Iranian military valiantly defended their country against a foreign invasion. Saddam’s forces had the backing of most of the developed world at the time — USA, USSR, Britain, France and their vassal states. It was a world war against one country.
I interviewed men who had lost their legs, eyes and other body parts in the war. I heard horror stories about the mass gassings and saw extensive evidence of the mass murder in Tehran’s Peace Museum. The genocidal campaign was carried out with full backing by the West. Over a million people died in the Western-backed war against Iran.
For over 40 years, the Iranian people have understood the word terrorism to mean the organised and sustained act of callous violence orchestrated by Western powers against their people. Iran has experienced more terrorism than any Western country. Since the US occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, terrorists working for US and Israeli intelligence have attacked targets in the Baluchistan-Sistan province. Terrorist attacks on mosques throughout the country have been intermittent since then.
The US occupation of Iraq in 2003 and the US/Israeli-instigated war in Syria since 2011 have escalated terrorism in Iran. The country now faces the prospect of invasion from a US-created terrorist army called the ‘Islamic State’. That the US created the army to destroy Bashar Al-Assad’s Syria, there can be no doubt; declassified US Department of Defense documents prove it.
In spite of the ongoing terrorist attacks, Iran remains a relatively free country. I have visited Iran 6 times since 2010. It is one of the friendliest and most relaxed countries to visit. Almost everywhere you go, people will stop and talk to you; they will invite you to their homes and do everything to make you feel welcome.
Security in Iran is more relaxed than in Europe. For example, in the airports there is less surveillance than in Paris; yet the country has experienced far more terrorism. But the government of Iran is not using terrorism to increase its power. Thousands of Iranian men are training to engage in combat against the terrorists in Iraq and Iran. They form part of a voluntary militia. For them, it is a religious and patriotic duty to defend their country and civilisation from the plaque of Takfiri terrorism, a barbaric form of Islam supported by the West’s closest allies Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Know thy enemy!
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is one of the main reasons why the Middle East has not been completely subjected to Israeli hegemony. For my Press TV film ‘Culture of Resistance’, I interviewed Hassan Abbasi, director of the IRGC thinktank ‘ The Center for Borderless Security Doctrinal Analysis’. Abbasi is described by his enemies as the “Henri Kissinger of Islam”. He is the most important strategist in the country, if not the entire Middle East. Abbasi is also a fervent critique of the current authorities in Iran and has been arrested by them on several occasions. He has denounced corruption and betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Abbasi wants to see a world without usury; a world where labourers receive just wages for their toil and war is only justified as a means of defence. Abbasi’s entire life struggle has been for peace and justice. He believes the current authorities in Tehran are in the hands of the globalists and have betrayed the values of Shia Islam.
In my interview with Abbasi, he gave me an overview of world history and geopolitics from a Persian perspective. Abbasi believes the civilisational crisis in the West is due to its de-Christianisation but that Christianity, through its trinitarian cognitive structure, has inadvertently led to its own demise. He sees Shia Islam as the only long-term solution for the world’s problems. In my interview with Abbasi, what struck me was his intimate knowledge of European philosophy. Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Foucault – the Iranians are diligent students of Western thought. One only needs to visit the book stores of Tehran to see the demand for Persian translations of Western philosophy. Iranian strategists know their enemy and their enemy knows they know them!
The objectives of the Islamic Revolution in Iran were to revive the country’s great intellectual tradition of scholarship and science, which flourished when Persia led the Islamic world.
In the 10th century during Persia’s Golden Age, Al Razi, Al Biruni, Avicenna and other polymaths were widely studied and appreciated throughout the world. Western science and philosophy owe much to Persia. For centuries the works of Al Razi, known in Latin as Rhazes, were an indispensable part of Western medical education.
Abbasi sees Iran in the context of its intellectual history as a nation whose role is to spread an Islamic civilisation, inspired by the universalism of the great philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age. St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest philosopher since Aristotle, often quoted from Persian scholars Avicenna and Al Farabi. Contemporary Iran’s great sin is that it refuses homogenisation by the West; it refuses to submit to the pensée unique of globalisation.
New horizons of thought
I attended two international conferences in Iran organised by the New Horizons NGO. The conferences invited writers from all over the world to discuss the prospects for peace in a world rapidly descending into chaos and war. The conferences had a profound effect on my own thinking about the world. I met American writer E. Micheal Jones there twice and began to understand the ineluctable necessity of the re-Christianisation of the West. The Islamic Republic of Iran turned me into a practising Roman Catholic.
At a conference on Palestine in 2017, I met Youssef Hindi, a Franco-Marrocan writer and scholar of Islam. His work has had an enormous impact in France on explaining the deeper structures driving the so-called ‘war on terror’. We now host a radio show together in French for Égalité et Réconciliation, France’s most popular political website. A Roman Catholic and Muslim are working closely together to unmask the lies driving Christians against Muslims in a period when many French nationalists are turning to hate-mongers such as Eric Zemmour.
Zemmour is considered by famous French author Michel Houellebecq to be a dissident. He is nothing of the sort. Zemmour claims Jews were always French patriots, and that France should imitate Israeli nationalism. He does not understand that France’s historical identity is Roman Catholic, the negation, not the friend of Judaism.
Zemmour, who claims to be an “atheist” but wears a kippa, is maliciously blaming all of France’s problems on its Muslim immigrants while ignoring the nefarious role of the country’s Jewish elites in promoting mass immigration and alliances with countries promoting Wahhabism.
Shia Muslims revere Christ
Nader Talebzadegh, an Iranian film director, is the director of the New Horizons conference. In 2007, he made the film ‘The Messiah’. It is about the life of Christ from an Islamic perspective. Iranians have great respect and reverence for Christians and imams in Iran regularly refer positively to Christ as a great prophet who they believe will return in the End Times with the Mahdi to liberate mankind from evil.
Talebzadegh’s film was an attempt to create an inter-faith dialogue between Christians and Muslims. It was given an award in 2007 by Religion Today film festival in Italy and was praised by the Vatican. Although the Islamic Republic of Iran forbids proselytisation, Armenians, who constitute one of the country’s Christian minorities, are protected by the government. One regularly hears stories of anti-Christian persecution in Iran. What the media fail to explain, however, is the close links many of the evangelical organisations have with the CIA and Mossad. What the media don’t tell you is that Western intellectuals who travel to Iran to have debates are being threatened by the governments of the “free world” with prosecution for terrorism.
This year Talebzadedh and other conference organisers were placed on the US sanctions list. They are accused of being agents of the IRGC. It is a lie. They have no link with any military organisation. But the real reason for the imposition of sanctions is the attempt to prevent networking among dissidents of the New World Order. For the first time in history, dissidents all over the world are meeting to discuss and debate. Talebzadegh is one of the few film directors whose work is driven by the quest for truth. In a world of lies, truth is illegal — truth is terrorism.
Iran’s struggle to survive
Western economic sanctions are making life extremely difficult for the Iranian people. The country has the economic potential to be a power-house of Central Asia. Iran has some of the world’s best engineers and scientists. By increasing sanctions, the US has pushed Iran closer to Russia and China. The long-term loss will be felt in the West. Billions of dollars of lucrative trade and investment deals are being handed to Beijing.
When one visits Iran, one must understand that the country is struggling to survive and be itself in a world dominated by those who want everything to be in their image. And the imperialists have unlimited resources of propaganda, disinformation and political subversion. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the US should use the Jewish-owned media and entertainment empire to corrupt the minds of Iran’s youth. Jewish pornography and trash culture entertainment are beamed into the country daily from foreign satellites. The Jews have been eminently successful in de-Christianising the West. Now they believe they can de-Islamicize Iran.
What the Jewish media in the West never tell their Gentile subjects is that Iran holds the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel – and they fully support the Islamic Republic.
No other country in the world is fighting harder to defeat terrorism than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran has lost many martyrs in Syria against the US-backed Islamic State. The attempt to criminalise the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps shows that the capital of the United States is in Occupied Palestine. The Israeli Lobby is the unofficial government of the United States. They are screaming ‘Persia est delenda’ in the halls of the US Senate. The US media is now comparing Iran to Al Qaeda. A false flag terrorist attack carried out in the West and blamed on Iran could trigger a world war. The Israeli leadership wants it; they believe world war is a necessary step towards the dissolution of nations and the final emergence of Israel as a global super-state. Opposition to their plans is terrorism. In the End Times, few will have the courage to resist them.
