Opinion
Britain can lead the way in Europe by proscribing the IRGC now
If Britain were to lead then other European countries would swiftly follow suit which would deal the IRGC a significant blow
August 4, 2023 16:22
3 min read
If Britain were to lead then other European countries would swiftly follow suit which would deal the IRGC a significant blow
August 4, 2023 16:22In last week’s JC, we revealed how the Islamic Students Association of Britain, an organisation for Shia Muslims that is closely linked to Iran’s brutal regime, piped antisemitic, apocalyptic propaganda to thousands of students at British universities through online talks by eight senior commanders from the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
Our story was followed up by several national newspapers and news outlets abroad, and it prompted Home Secretary Suella Braverman to tell the Sunday Times that Iran represents the biggest threat to British national security.
However, it seems that Sunni extremists have also been active on campus, for in this week’s paper we publish another exclusive report. It shows that speakers from the UK branch of the international jihadi group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which wants to create a global caliphate and wipe Israel off the map, have given talks at several universities over the past eighteen months - in defiance of a ban on its members speaking on campuses imposed by the National Union of Students back in 2004.
None of the speakers we identify were billed as Hizb ut-Tahrir members when their talks were advertised. They include one Luqman Muqeem, an engineer based in Stoke-on-Trent. The former “head brother” at Aston university’s Islamic society, his social media posts include calls for Muslims to fight Jews to the death, and a claim that the only “promised land” for Jews is hell.
Tony Blair said he wanted to proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir under the Terrorism Act when he was still prime minister in 2005, but it didn’t happen.
Meanwhile, as JC readers will be well aware, the conflict inside government over proscribing the IRGC continues unabated. Braverman is strongly in favour of proscription, and her remarks should be read in that context.
Early last month, the most recent occasion when the issue has been mentioned in Parliament, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said that preserving UK lives and national security was his top priority, insisting there would be “no hiding place for those who seek to do us harm” - notwithstanding his department’s continued, trenchant resistance to proscribing the IRGC.
It’s interesting to note that this debate has a precedent – the struggle that took place in Washington before the Trump administration decided to “designate” the IRGC as a “foreign terrorist organisation” in 2019 – something that makes it much easier for US government agencies to go after its members and supporters, and to seize its funds.
On Thursday, I attended a fascinating online seminar on the IRGC held by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, a leading Israeli think tank. Contributors included Israel’s intelligence minister Gila Gamliel, who visited London to make the case for proscription in June; the former Iranian deputy prime minister Mohsen Sazegan, who actually helped to found the IRGC in 1979, years before he became a campaigner against the regime; and Vahid Beheshti, who endured a 72-day hunger strike in an effort to persuade Cleverly to change his mind.
Needless to say, all were in favour of proscription, and argued that if Britain were to lead, other European countries would swiftly follow suit – so dealing the IRGC a significant blow. This, in a sense, was preaching to the choir. However, one of the most cogent contributions came from John Bolton, the former US National Security Adviser and ambassador to the UN, who focused not on proscription’s benefits, but on bureaucratic resistance to it.
In the US, Bolton said, “we had a head start”, because President Ronald Reagan had designated Iran a “state sponsor of terror" in the 1980s. Nevertheless, he went on, when pressure built to designate the IRGC specifically, “it met with stiff domestic US opposition”.
Just as is now the case in Whitehall, this came from America’s foreign ministry, the State Department. Its staff argued that designation/proscription was a measure appropriate for non-state actors such as Hamas or Hezbollah, not for a key element of the Iranian state. I’ve heard the same argument in London. Other objections Bolton listed are equally familiar.
They include the claim that proscription would create a huge bureaucratic burden because Iranians seeking visas would have to be vetted to ensure they had no IRGC links, and a fear that it would “destabilise” Iran and the region. Diplomats, Bolton said, don’t like change, preferring to “engage” with the devil they know.
One argument that helped overcome US opposition was the fact that in the not too distant future, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 84 years old and apparently in poor health, is going to die.
There has only been one previous occasion since the Islamic revolution in 1979 when Iran has had to negotiate a transfer of power, when Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. When it happens again, Bolton said, “this will be the point when the government is most fragile… This could happen any day and we need to be ready for it.”
The street protests that have rocked Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini eleven months ago have made it clear that millions of Iranians desperately want a change of regime. There are plenty of arguments for proscribing the IRGC because of its role in sponsoring antisemitism and terror. But as Bolton pointed out, when Khamenei goes, the IRGC will likely play a critical role in determining the succession.
If proscription can help to weaken it to the point where it does not prevail, this would be an incalculable boon – as well as something we can and should do for the Iranian people.
Sign up to the JC's politics newsletter here