What’s Worse, Storming An Embassy Or Assassinating Scientists?

If it involves a hate-object nation like Iran, clearly mobs storming consulates is an outrage, worthy of condemnation by the UN Security Council and lectures by the President of the U.S. about responsibility. Assassinating Iranian physicists, however, is barely worth reporting in the papers. And when it is reported, it’s with the pretense that who’s doing it is a “mystery.”

UK PM David Cameron calls the overrunning of Britain’s embassy in Tehran by a mob  “outrageous” and “indefensible” and threatens unspecified “grave consequences.” Unlike any consequences the U.S. or Israel suffer for assassinating scientists inside another country. Or any that the UK and U.S. suffered for overthrowing the last democratic regime in Iran in 1953, imposing a vicious dictator, the “Shah” (“King”), who killed 250,000 Iranians during the course of his bloody reign. With the CIA’s help, his secret police, the SAVAK, did such a great job of torturing and exterminating anyone with a smidgen of progressive, democratic consciousness that when the Iranian people couldn’t take any more, only fundamentalist mullahs were left as an organized group to fill the power vacuum. So an oppressive, theocratic oligarchy is the legacy of the U.S.-UK coup. (During his quarter century reign, Amnesty International listed Iran as the world’s worst human rights violator.)

Now “international outrage” is the order of the day for trashing the British embassy. (No harm was done to any British personnel.) Murdering scientists? Don’t mention it. Take a guess what the reaction would be if Iran was assassinating people inside the UK or U.S.

There’s a history here, which the Western media assiduously blacks out so people won’t be aware of it. But people in Iran are aware of it. I suspect that is why, of all the countries with sanctions against Iran, the UK’s facilities were attacked. (The U.S. has no diplomatic mission in Iran.)

No, this doesn’t mean I’m on Iran’s “side.” I’m not. I’m objective. Something very rare.

By the way, Israel sacked the Soviet embassy in Beirut during their 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the CIA had a plan to attack the Chinese embassy in Havana in the early 1960s, including killing Chinese diplomatic personnel. The Western media threw those bits of history down the memory hole. “History” in the West (and everywhere, unfortunately) is a process of selective “remembering” (often distorted or flat-out false) and convenient “forgetting,” driven by concealed political and ideological agendas, while feigning “objectivity.”

[After I wrote this, later in the day the BBC kindly illustrated my point about dishonest propagandists blacking out history.  The anchor on “World (Dis)Service” interviewed the BBC’s Jonathan Marcus, who “explained” Iranian behavior in terms of Iranian perceptions about British involvement in the region. No mention of the 1953 coup, or Britain colonizing the region by force, or dispossessing Palestinians in favor of Jews from Europe. Not that the Iranian regime is reasonable, or decent.  But painting it black and white, as in We the West are the Good Guys and Iran is Evil is clearly not journalism but propaganda. Propaganda designed to prepare public opinion for another war, in fact.]