Western Values, Barbarian Conduct

13 January 2012 | 15:01 Code : 1897033 General category
Another Iranian nuclear scientist is assassinated in cold blood; but does the West care?
Western Values, Barbarian Conduct

IRD: Different pictures, the same impression: early Wednesday morning, a magnetic bomb chops off the upper half of the head of a young Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, in northern Tehran. A few hours later, AlJazeera published a video showing four blissful US Marine soldiers, brave heroes in the “War against Terror”, urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents, clearly ignorant of how much Islam -like any other religion- cares about the dignity of dead bodies.

 

Colonialism might be history, at least in its bold, arrogant guise of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but apparently its residue still runs deep in the psyche of certain Western politicians and commentators when it comes to the Middle East; thus, who cares if an Afghan family is torn to pieces in a wedding ceremony by state-of-the-art drones designed by the “progressive” Americans? Or would it really matter if an Iranian woman actually witnessed the head of his husband, quantum theorist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, just blown off by a remote-controlled bomb? After all, Ali-Mohammadi and his fellow victims, three, to speak accurately, were nuclear scientists working for a “fundamentalist” country trying to produce nukes to wipe Israel off of the map, or its Western patrons, in a modern-day Armageddon --damn the fact that throughout all those years of close inspection, credible evidence to prove Iran's so-called “nuclear ambitions” amount to exactly zero.

 

Andrew Cummings feels free to comment in Guardian that such killings are among the few options left, “the lesser of many evils,” to quote him, as Tehran refuses to settle the nuclear dispute through negotiations (Cummings might have put a pin in the fact that Tehran actually did make a deal in 2010 with proxy negotiators Brazil and Turkey to consign its enriched uranium stockpile –just to be rejected forthrightly by Madam Hillary Clinton even though she was the one who had initially encouraged the Turkish PM Erdogan to sit at the table and convince Iran.) His forefathers probably thought in the same vein, when in WWII they occupied Iran –despite the country’s declaration of a policy of neutrality—to curb Germany’s advances into Soviet territory: thousands of Iranians died of hunger as wheat crops were confiscated by the British to satiate their soldiers who were fighting against the Nazis. That, too, was rife with “physical, diplomatic and legal risks”, but again, it was “the lesser of many evils”, not of course for the Iranians, but for the British. On the higher profile, Rick Santorum, the pious Catholic, man of the family would-be-president has already made it quite clear what he thinks if Iranian nuclear scientists are killed: “wonderful”, in his own candid words.

 

One day after Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was killed by the bomb, President Obama basked in the pleasure of a friendly conversation with Bibi Netanyahu, to discuss “developments in Iran” and to assure the hawkish Israeli PM of his “unshakeable commitment to Israel's security.” That’s the word: unshakeable, even if means shaking the foundations of core Western values.