{"id":235145,"date":"2021-02-19T09:44:49","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T14:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/?p=235145"},"modified":"2023-02-01T05:11:45","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T04:11:45","slug":"silence-on-iranian-terror-case-reflects-dangerous-old-habits-of-european-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/news\/terrorism-a-fundamentalism\/silence-on-iranian-terror-case-reflects-dangerous-old-habits-of-european-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Silence on Iranian Terror Case Reflects Dangerous Old Habits of European Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"iran-zarif-terrorism-assadi-19022021\"<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, the International Committee in Search of Justice released a statement that decried European silence over the recent conviction, in a Belgian court, of Assadollah Assadi<\/a>, a high-ranking Iranian diplomat who led an operation aimed at detonating a bomb at a massive gathering of Iranian expatriates near Paris. It is extremely unfortunate that the organization felt the need to issue this latest statement, considering that it is not the first of its kind, and it reflects the apparently deliberately neglect of policy advice that had been offered in previous weeks by dozens of European lawmakers and former government officials.<\/p>\n

The new statement<\/a> reiterated a point that had been made many times during the trial itself: that \u201cthere can be no doubt Assadi\u2019s terrorist outrage was planned and ordered from the highest echelons of the regime, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president Hassan Rouhani, the foreign Minister Javad Zarif<\/a> and the Minister of Intelligence Mahmoud Alavi.\u201d The evidence for this conclusion is manifold, and it includes the simple fact that Assadi, as the third counsellor at Iran\u2019s embassy in Vienna, would have been in close contact with higher-ranked diplomats including Zarif himself, making it impossible that the Foreign Ministry could have been unaware of his activities.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the goal of the terror plot was in line with a longstanding obsession of the Iranian regime itself, in that it sought to disrupt the most symbolically significant event organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI<\/a>) and to kill that coalition\u2019s leader, Maryam Rajavi<\/a>. The NCRI\u2019s main constituent group is the People\u2019s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI-MEK<\/a>), and in January 2018, Khamenei publicly credited the group as the main driving force behind a then-ongoing uprising against the ruling system. From that point forward, leading Iranian officials have been warning their supporters about the clear prospect for more unrest along these lines, and in November 2019 another protest movement<\/a> eclipsed the first one, spreading instantly to nearly 200 cities and towns.<\/p>\n

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An Iranian diplomat convicted to 20 years imprisonment by a court in Belgium - February 2021<\/div><\/div>
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