Paying for Iran’s Transgressions

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Paying for Iran’s Transgressions

A transaction Britain and the West can ill-afford

When an Iranian mob trashed the embassy compound in Tehran in 2011, the British government insisted that relations would not normalize until the Iranians paid full compensation for the damage. The Iranians refused to pay for anything; the British ended up paying for everything.

This is yet another concession by Britain and the West in their dealings with Iran.

Can we afford to continue paying for what Iran won’t? What’s at stake here is national and human survival!

The Telegraph wrote on August 23: “Britain’s vandalized embassy in Iran reopened on Sunday—with graffiti still daubed above a portrait of the Queen saying ‘Death to England.’”

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told the predominantly Iranian audience at the opening ceremony: “We will not always agree but as confidence and trust grows, there should be no limit over time to what we can achieve together.”

The problem is that those aspirations for mutual cooperation are not themselves mutual. Britain, not Iran, is removing the limits and giving everything.

The damage repairs cost British taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. But even then, not everything had been repaired at the opening ceremony. There were visible signs of damage such as broken mirrors. The graffiti-covered walls were not repaired ostensibly because the procedure requires specialized expertise to preserve the embassy’s elegant walls. Yet, as the Telegraph observed, no effort was made to at least temporarily mask the offensive threats scribbled on the embassy’s walls.

These were the walls greeting Britain’s first foreign secretary visiting Iran in 12 years!

Hammond explained his nation’s foreign policy with regards to Iran: “In my experience, if you set down preconditions in a situation where you have no dialogue, then you get stasis.” In other words, there wouldn’t be any progress.

Now contrast that with Iran’s age-old preconditions: death to England; death to America; Israel must be wiped off the map; remove all sanctions before any nuclear deal.

In another Telegraph article, Con Coughlin wrote:

[N]ever slow to exploit an opportunity to further their interests, the ayatollahs have recently undertaken a sophisticated charm offensive to persuade people who should know better that a strategic relationship with Tehran would be in Britain’s long-term interests. …[The British] government now appears content to turn a blind eye to some of Iran’s more egregious activities.

Coughlin then warned about how Britain’s warming relations with Iran would damage London’s relations with its historic allies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia. “If that is what really lies behind Mr. Hammond’s visit to Tehran today,” Coughlin said, “then we are heading for a foreign policy disaster of truly catastrophic proportions. For, make no mistake, so long as ayatollahs remain in power, Iran will never be Britain’s friend.”

The ayatollahs and the radicals of Iran—not the moderates or the ordinary Iranian citizens—are the ones in favor of the West’s concessions the most. They benefit the most from sanctions relief and increased diplomatic legitimacy.

These concessions are suicidal—just as Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted after the nuclear deal was signed.

http://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/624909057573408768/photo/1

Consider the significance of what the West is paying—for Iran. Then consider also how World War iii is prophesied to start. Daniel 11:40-44 say that Iran—the biblical “king of the south”—will trigger that global conflagration.

As my father explained in his August 15 Key of David program, the world is now staring a nuclear world war ultimately because it rejects God’s knowledge (Hosea 4:6). Yet God offers it to us freely. It only costs our application of the knowledge.