Starmer’s Blind Obedience
International law, when obeyed slavishly, is a boon to the world’s monsters
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been murderous since its earliest years. I know this because, while it was barely one year old in May 1980, it assassinated a school-friend of mine. Bahram Dehqani-Tafti was driving back into Tehran from the college where he lectured on the city’s northern rim, when two Revolutionary Guards ambushed him and shot him dead. He was only 24. Why was he killed? Because his father was the country’s Anglican bishop.
Since then, the Republic has executed up to five thousand gays, sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, fostered terrorist violence throughout the Middle East, plotted more than twenty would-be lethal attacks on British soil in the past twelve months, and killed over twenty thousand Iranian protesters since January. And all the while striving to acquire nuclear weapons.
Keir Starmer knows all this. In explaining the UK government’s stance toward the weekend’s US and Israeli attacks on Iran, he freely admitted it. Yet, he refuses to let Britain join the assault, because the attorney-general, Lord Hermer, has told him it would be against international law. Without authorisation by the UN Security Council—which Russia and China would surely veto—the only belligerency the UN Charter permits is self-defence. Arguably, the threat Iran now poses to the US and Israel is not imminent or grave enough to warrant pre-emptive action.
