Here’s Mehdi Hasan on Comment is Free:
If you were our mullah in Tehran, wouldn’t you want Iran to have the bomb – or at the very minimum, “nuclear latency” (that is, the capability and technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon if threatened with attack)?
Let’s be clear: there is still no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb. The latest report from the IAEA, despite its much discussed reference to “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme”, also admits that its inspectors continue “to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at [Iran’s] nuclear facilities”. The leaders of the Islamic Republic – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – maintain their goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs.
Nonetheless, wouldn’t it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?
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So what is to be done? Sanctions haven’t worked and won’t work. Iranians refuse to compromise on what they believe to be their “inalienable” right to nuclear power under the Non-proliferation treaty.
But Harry’s Place readers will have heard this all before. You’ll have heard it in a sermon Mehdi Hasan delivered a few years back, where, after insisting that non-Muslims lived ‘like animals’, he praised a religious ruling by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic:
“Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying the stockpiling, the production, the use of nuclear weapons us forbidden under Islam. Spot on. Islamic Republic of Iran. The fatwa of the Supreme Leader.”
As far as I can tell, Mehdi Hasan takes this argument at face value. The Ayatollah has spoken! The matter is settled! Perhaps why he’s so insistent that there is “no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb”.
I’m not sure that Mehdi Hasan is very good at decoupling religion from politics.
