Hands off Iran!

Campaign: 
28/06/2006
The American Empire tries to crush opponents pre-emptively
Anti-imperialist Camp
After Palestine, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq it is now the turn of Iran. Tehran has been long named head of the "axis of the evil" but Washington had other pressing bellicose needs on the way to global predominance.

The media campaign against Iran is based on similar pretexts like the one against Iraq some years back. Like Iraq now Iran is being displayed as a danger to world peace and security. But for the biggest part of the world there is already now neither peace nor security. Capitalist globalisation and concomitant imperial war and occupation render life to hell for the majority of the world's population. They know well that the head and source of their misery are the US and their allies. It is them who are the main danger. But it is true that Iran like all other forces not willing to completely subordinate to Washington are indeed a danger, but not for the peoples but for the very empire. Any movement, people or national state able to defend its sovereignty would stir others to do the same entailing a domino effect towards a multi-polar world - something the US must pre-emptively strike against.

"Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." Article IV-1 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is more than clear. What Tehran is defending, namely its right to control the entire nuclear cycle, is in full compliance with international law. It is the US and its allies which are in breach of the treaty which Israel did not even sign. But Western corporate media is turning reality up side down as we already experienced in the precedent wars.

Everybody knows that the civil use of nuclear energy is not the point. It is all about the potential military use of the technology which the full command over the industrial chain of uranium enrichment. We have to speak out what Iran cannot say: as long the empire and its prime protà©gà© Israel is armed to the teeth with atomic bombs the possession of nuclear arms in the hands of the weak remains a powerful deterrence as North Korea shows to the world. In a period of total war waged by the US it serves as a means to defend at least the precedent equilibrium. It is only on the nuclear field there the overwhelming US superiority in military technology can be broken.

Against Iran the West is positioning its most powerful propaganda arm: anti-Semitism. Of course this is not new and many new Hitlers have been detected always in the places the US intended to attack (first Milosevic, then Saddam and now Ahmadinejad). But according to the West Ahmadinejad is denying the Holocaust which seems to be irrefutable evidence for their claim.

Iran's president simply states that, if the European mainstream assumption, that Germany as a nation bears the responsibility for the Holocaust, is right, then she should atone its guilt by ceding parts of its territory to a Jewish state. Not the Palestinians who have no connection whatsoever to this genocidal crime should pay but the Germans. This syllogism is completely correct. But its very premise is erroneous, namely the uncontested assumption of German collective guilt. This is not Ahmadinejad's responsibility but the European state ideologist's one. Imperialism tries to make use of the crimes against the Jews to justify the crime against the Palestinians. Actually it were the German capitalist-imperialist elites who committed the genocide with the full knowledge and complicity of Anglo-Saxon imperialism which already at that time tried to use the anti-Semitic threat to build Zionist settlements as bridgeheads in the strategic Middle East - and not the Germans as a nation.

Furthermore Ahmadinejad is accused of denying the Holocaust calling it a myth. But to call it a myth does not necessarily imply to deny the historic reality of the genocide committed on the Jews. What is actually true is that the West has mystified the Holocaust absconding it from history and transforming it into a civil religion. Its political use by Zionism is immediate: promote Israel as the only protection from the eternal and absolute Negative driving history and being revealed by the apocalyptic Holocaust. Ahmadinejad is right when he notices that this Zionist religion acquired at least in Europe a status by far exceeding the traditional worshipping of the monotheist transcendent good. And his proof is persuasive. He implicitly asks: Why does the mere opinion denying the dogma bring you in Europe behind prison bars while a war is waged allegedly for freedom of opinion? Freedom means to be allowed to state also wrong things. Only the most die-hard positivist can claim that history is a chain of objective facts and not subject to controversial interpretation. Why then can the US genocide in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam etc. be displayed as an incessant struggle for freedom?

If the Arab and Muslim masses fight Zionist and imperialist oppression they oppose also their ideology in whose name they are subdued. In attacking the Zionist dogma of Holocaust justifying Israel it's not astonishing that they turn it up side down contesting also the very genocide against the Jews. This is the sole responsibility of Zionism. We do not know whether the Iranian president runs into this trap. What we do know indeed is that historic anti-Semitism does no more constitute a danger for Jews as it's lost the backing of the capitalist-imperialists elites. Today it is the anti-Arab anti-Muslim stance which got the backing of the elites. They have cunningly constructed the mentioned civil religion which under the guise of averting the genocide's repetition is justifying it. This civil religion must be dismantled as it has today the same role as anti-Semitism at the time.

The US and its allies keep turning the spiral of escalation. This time they have learnt their lesson from their hubris of omnipotence and have brought their European allies on board. It is actually Germany, France and England who are preparing the aggression. We have to build a broad movement against the warmongers defending Iran's national sovereignty drawing also the lessons of the Iraq war, namely that it will not be the Europeans to stop the US but the resistance of the aggressed peoples themselves which we must support.

To stand with Iran against the West does in no way imply a political support to Tehran's regime as the defence of Iraq did not mean to support politically Saddam. We do not shut our eyes in front of the crimes committed first of all against the Iraqi people where Tehran helps the US occupation against the resistance in return to the hopeless hope not to be attacked. We also denounce the repression against the poor toiling masses struggling for their social and political rights as well as the national minorities. The defence of the nation will need their mobilisation which will be a decisive lever for their empowerment against the capitalist elite tending towards reconciliation with imperialism. As in Iraq we support the popular resistance - whether Islamic or not - against the imperialist aggression while co-operating with anyone fighting our main enemy.

Defend Iran's sovereignty including the to use nuclear power!
Disarm Israel's nukes!
No sanction against Iran, stop the war drive!
US out of the Gulf!
Smash the US Empire!

July 2006