Last week Iranian Professor and the nation’s leading nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in an apparent terrorist assassination. This tends to happen to Iran’s nuclear researchers.
A lot.
The Iranian government suspects U.S. client state Israel of this killing, just as it has in the past with other killings. Perhaps we’ll never know for certain.
We do, however, know that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in the recent past called out Dr. Fakhrizadeh by name, and earlier this month U.S. President Donald Trump asked advisors for military bombing strike options against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Our President had also already proudly and publicly ordered the illegal assassination of another Iranian official earlier this year. The United States tends to do those types of things.
A lot.
The U.S. and Israel also usually work with one another on little criminal projects like this in the Middle East, so if either one was involved in this killing, it may be reasonable to assume that it did so with the other’s explicit or implicit blessing. Perhaps we’ll never know for certain.
If the Middle Eastern tyrant tag-team were involved in this killing of Fakhrizadeh, it would be only the latest act of war against Iran. Crazy as it may sound to Western ears, that we’ve managed to avoid an all-out hot war thus far with Iran in the past four years only appears to be thanks to the restraint of the Iranian government.
From breaking nuclear deals, to illegal assassinations of its military leaders, to cruel sanctions which are killing thousands as their nation is ravaged by Covid-19, the unstable and murderous U.S. empire keeps trying to goad Iran into war. The pretense from the U.S. and Israel is usually Iran’s mythical nuclear weapons program that no one credible has yet to find proof of.
Meanwhile, the only nation to have ever slaughtered people with Atomic Bombs, and who has more stockpiled than any other country on earth – the U.S. – along with the only Middle Eastern state who possesses nuclear weapons – Israel – continues to commit crimes against Iran’s people and their sovereignty.
Try to imagine, if you can, what untempered hell would have been unleashed if in the past year a U.S. military general or a U.S. nuclear scientist had been killed, to say nothing of if both had happened. Our history suggests that we would have picked a country with Brown people and natural resources out of a hat and begun bombing them to oblivion before we could even find out who was responsible.
The killing of a scientist like this would be a war crime even if it were done by one country which was officially at war with the researcher’s own nation. Yet, Israel and our own government just giddily and proudly continue such assaults on Iran.
Our incoming President Joe Biden had better denounce this killing, whoever is responsible, or his claim that he’ll return to diplomacy with Iran will ring hollow.