If you follow these things, you might have noticed that last month, in one of Sir Keir Starmer’s last major decisions as PM, the government designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a state threat under the new National Security (State Threats) Act.
This was hailed as a major step forward, after many years in which both Labour and Conservative governments had been urged to proscribe the organisation which is behind Iran’s global terror network.
It was certainly better than not designating the IRGC, and to give the government due credit, this was more than its predecessors had done. But as is so often the way, the devil was in the detail – and this was not, as it was widely described, proscription.
As Kasra Aarabi has pointed out, designation as a tool is far weaker than full proscription when it comes to dealing with the IRGC’s activities in the UK, because much of its influence and role is through nurturing and supporting home-grown Islamist radicalisation, while the National Security (State Threats) Act was – as its name shows - designed to tackle the activities of traditional state actors such as Russia.
To see the weakness of designation in action, you only need to have looked at the streets of central London this past weekend. I’m not referring to the usual hate marches which provide regular opportunities for supporters of the Iranian regime to march and declare their hatred of the West and of Jews. No, this weekend saw something far more specific: the so-called Arbaeen Procession which saw thousands of regime supporters march from Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner in order to commemorate Imam Hussain and the martyrs of Karbala and to honour the memory of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former Supreme Leader, responsible recently for the murder of some 40,000 Iranians who dared to protest against the regime.
The scenes were truly horrifying – and would be chilling even if on the streets of Tehran. The marchers openly celebrated a terrorist state which celebrates the death of its own people and plots the destruction of the West and the murder of Jews worldwide, seeing it as its duty to wipe Jews from the face of the earth.
As a nation, we have not merely been negligent in tackling the development and solidifying of radical Islam within our borders; we have been wilfully blind to it. We have imported extremists and made their lives here as comfortable as possible. We have not only failed to legislate to tackle the threat posed by Islamists; we have passed laws which actively prevent us from tackling that threat, under the guise of human rights. We have stood and watched as mosques not only provide platforms for hate preachers; we have done nothing when they proudly boast of the platforms they provide, sharing sermons and speeches online. And we have, under the supposed right to free speech, allowed Islamist extremists to gather in our cities and our towns and effectively take them over for hours – and sometimes days – at a time, while our authorities do nothing.
This is what we saw this weekend in London, where the success of the IRGC’s network of influence in winning the minds not only of many Muslims but also of so-called progressives was evident in the support given to the Iranian regime, all as the authorities still refuse to act against British charities and mosques which spread IRGC-propaganda.
The Arbaeen Procession should be viewed as part of a continuum which stretches from propaganda videos and hate preachers to full scale terror, with attacks on the two main IRGC targets: Jews and “infidel” opponents of the regime. This year’s attacks on Jewish sites, for example, was mainly the work of the IRGC-backed Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right (IMCR), also known as Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia.
That we allow such a demonstration on our streets is not, as some would have it, a sign of our strength as a democracy. It is, rather, a dramatic sign of our weakness – of our inability to recognise the extent to which we allow our democracy and our civil society to be poisoned by those who seek to destroy both. We are losing the fight against extremists because we have decided to lose it. Should we eventually decide to act, we must do so before it is too late.
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