Why do so many educated idiots make excuses for Iran?

Here are the arguments that are too obvious for them to understand

The clock in central Tehran which counts down to September 9, 2040, the date prophesied by the Ayatollah for Israel’s destruction

It is no exaggeration to say that there is no evil so extreme that it cannot be supported, so long as it is locked in a fight with the Jews. Entirely predictably, now that Israel is bombing Iran, the regime that tortures and murders its own people and funds terrorism around the world is finding plentiful defenders in the West.

Setting aside the cretinous activists who take to the streets of London with posters of the Ayatollah – let’s not even bother with them – there is a coterie of elite commentators who insist that Iran posed no threat to Israel, even though a clock in central Tehran literally counts down the minutes to its destruction.

On BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze this week, the guest before me, a certain Sir Richard Dalton, former British ambassador to Iran, was adamant that in order to justify a pre-emptive strike, Israel would need to demonstrate that the Iranians had “both the intent and the capabilities” to attack. They had neither, he said.

How did the man keep a straight face? When it came to my turn, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, quizzed me on the judgment that an Iranian nuclear bomb was “imminent”.

The fact that Israeli, American and other intelligence services, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency, had assessed that the regime was “very close” to nuclear weapons, seemed to make little difference. Israel, I was informed, had “broken international law” and thus should presumably have allowed itself to be nuked.

I will never cease to be surprised by the casual attitude of our lanyard classes towards existential threats facing the Jews. If their own children were in the cross-hairs, something tells me that they would find their sense of urgency. I tried to make this point repeatedly but it failed to get though. You can listen to the episode here.

For this reason, I thought I would spend a bit of time this Friday evening setting down a couple of basic facts about Iran that are so obvious that they are often ignored. (As George Orwell once put it, “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them”.)

Regime thugs amputate a man’s hand with a circular saw

Firstly, consider the United Arab Emirates, which lies just across the Persian Gulf from southern Iran. It has long enjoyed a peaceful nuclear programme which produces 25 per cent of its energy. The uranium it uses is enriched to about three per cent, which is the level needed for civilian power, and it purchases it on the international marker rather than enriching it at home.

If Tehran genuinely required nuclear power for non-military purposes, that is exactly what it would have done. Instead, it insisted on developing its own capacity for enrichment, and produced a stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, which is most of the way to the 90 per cent required for an active nuclear weapon.

Indeed, in 2023, international inspectors found traces of 83.7 per cent enriched uranium at Fordo in northern Iran. The regime has since blocked them from freely visiting their nuclear sites. All of this brings us to a blindingly obvious question: If Iran was not pursuing a weapon, why is it enriching beyond three per cent? Its programme has cost four times that of the UAE, and services no more than one per cent of Iran’s energy needs.

Second on the list of points that are too obvious for the elites to understand: the Fordo site is located deep in a mountain lair suitable for a Bond villain, rendering it very difficult to destroy from the air (as Israeli planes did to Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, which was built aboveground, in 1981.)

Again, if Iran had nothing to hide, why would it fortify its enrichment facilities in this way? Neither the Emiratis nor any other nation that has a genuinely peaceful nuclear programme feels the need to bury their facilities deep under a mountain.

Ultimately, what Operation Rising Lion has taught the world is that if you continually vow that you are going to wipe Israel off the map, and you take every step possible to do so, then sooner or later you’re going to get hit, even if clever idiots in the West do all they can to support you.

It is only a mild surprise that in this most cut-and-dry of moral scenarios, so many cosseted commentators have chosen to make excuses for one of the worst regime in the world rather than simply recognise the truth and state it boldly.