President Biden has warned that a direct Iranian attack on Israel may come “sooner rather than later”. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) yesterday proudly boasted of seizing a Portuguese-flagged, “Israeli-linked” container ship near the Straits of Hormuz.
Such Red Sea piracy is not a new proposition for the Tehran regime, but it is usually carried out by its Houthi proxies, not by a direct arm of the state. The same is so far true of rocket attacks on Israel itself, facilitated and paid for by IRGC but carried out by its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies.
Despite the IRGC’s vast Middle East terror network and its links to kidnap and assassination plots in the UK, our Government has long resisted calls to proscribe the organisation. After this latest act of piracy, this ban must now follow without further delay.
But there is a wider question. What has brought us to the point where Washington is warning of a wider Middle East conflict? Those who remember the White House’s predictions of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine from early 2022, widely disbelieved at the time, will be alarmed.
Israel has been engaged in an existential struggle for the security of its people since Hamas launched its murderous onslaught on October 7 last year. Western powers almost without exception proclaimed their solidarity with the Jewish state in the aftermath of this pogrom. “Never again is now” became the cri de cœur from London to Washington, Brussels to Berlin.
Yet, as Israel got down to the business of actually neutralising Hamas’s genocidal threat and ensuring the safety of its people, this support – gradually at first, then with ever-rising momentum – began to ebb away. While the United States previously vetoed United Nations resolutions demanding a one-sided ceasefire in Gaza that would prevent the Hamas terrorists from being crushed and allow them to regroup, last month it abstained. The UK voted in favour.
As Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron has championed Ukraine’s resistance to Moscow and loudly made the case for the West doing the maximum to resist Putin’s tyranny. But he has not shown the same resolution against the Iranian regime, another autocracy that threatens all our values.
Is it any wonder that Tehran is now engaging in its dangerous adventurism when the West’s resolution has been shown to be so ambiguous? An unambiguous defence of Israel’s legitimate right to do all that is necessary to counter the terrorist threat will make it clear to Iran that its machinations are futile.
President Biden has warned that a direct Iranian attack on Israel may come “sooner rather than later”. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) yesterday proudly boasted of seizing a Portuguese-flagged, “Israeli-linked” container ship near the Straits of Hormuz.
Such Red Sea piracy is not a new proposition for the Tehran regime, but it is usually carried out by its Houthi proxies, not by a direct arm of the state. The same is so far true of rocket attacks on Israel itself, facilitated and paid for by IRGC but carried out by its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies.
Despite the IRGC’s vast Middle East terror network and its links to kidnap and assassination plots in the UK, our Government has long resisted calls to proscribe the organisation. After this latest act of piracy, this ban must now follow without further delay.
But there is a wider question. What has brought us to the point where Washington is warning of a wider Middle East conflict? Those who remember the White House’s predictions of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine from early 2022, widely disbelieved at the time, will be alarmed.
Israel has been engaged in an existential struggle for the security of its people since Hamas launched its murderous onslaught on October 7 last year. Western powers almost without exception proclaimed their solidarity with the Jewish state in the aftermath of this pogrom. “Never again is now” became the cri de cœur from London to Washington, Brussels to Berlin.
Yet, as Israel got down to the business of actually neutralising Hamas’s genocidal threat and ensuring the safety of its people, this support – gradually at first, then with ever-rising momentum – began to ebb away. While the United States previously vetoed United Nations resolutions demanding a one-sided ceasefire in Gaza that would prevent the Hamas terrorists from being crushed and allow them to regroup, last month it abstained. The UK voted in favour.
As Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron has championed Ukraine’s resistance to Moscow and loudly made the case for the West doing the maximum to resist Putin’s tyranny. But he has not shown the same resolution against the Iranian regime, another autocracy that threatens all our values.
Is it any wonder that Tehran is now engaging in its dangerous adventurism when the West’s resolution has been shown to be so ambiguous? An unambiguous defence of Israel’s legitimate right to do all that is necessary to counter the terrorist threat will make it clear to Iran that its machinations are futile.