Hate Actually
The unprovoked assault on Iran
ON SATURDAY thousands of people marched in London against the Israeli-US attack on Iran and the Lebanon.
Organised by the Stop The War Coalition, many of those who attended will have been readers of the Observer.
On Sunday they will have searched the paper in vain for any mention of the protest.
The march ended outside No 10 Downing Street with chants of “Starmer, Starmer, Starmer — blood on your hands” and “Starmer, Starmer, Starmer —see you in the Hague”.
On the day of the march, the Guardian — which also ignored it — published an article by one of its columnists, Timothy Garton Ash.
He recalled the famous scene in Love Actually where Prime Minister Hugh Grant stands up to the US president at No 10.
A reporter asks the President (played by Billy Bob Thornton) how his visit to the UK had gone.
He replies:
Very satisfactory indeed.
We got what we came for, and our special relationship is still very special.
Prime Minister Grant replies:
I love that word relationship. Covers all manner of sins, doesn’t it?
I fear that this has become a bad relationship.
A relationship based on the President taking exactly what he wants, and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain.
A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.
And the President should be prepared for that.
That’s what Saturday’s marchers were calling for from Keir Starmer.
A bit of backbone.
Missing in Action
IGNORING THE march is just part of the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of the current conflict.
The US-led-by-Israel coalition justified its attack on the need to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and to prevent its support of “terrorism”.
This ignores the stark fact that Israel developed its nuclear capability in clear defiance of international law.
Israel will neither confirm nor deny it has these weapons while the US position is described as “deliberate ambiguity”.
So Israel has long fomented a situation where it demands transparency from Iran while concealing its own arsenal of nuclear warheads.
The influential Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2025 report notes that Israel’s secrecy leaves:
… significant uncertainty about the number and characteristics of its nuclear weapons.
The Institute:
… estimates that Israel’s stockpile probably remained stable at around 90 warheads as of January 2025.
Israel is believed to be modernising its nuclear arsenal and in 2024 conducted a test of a missile propulsion system, possibly related to its Jericho family of missiles.
It is also upgrading its plutonium production reactor facility at the Negev Nuclear Research Center (NNRC) near Dimona.
Israel ignored a 2014 UN General Assembly resolution that it should join the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons.
The resolution also called on Israel to place all of its nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) comprehensive safeguards.
Israel did not comply.
Iran has no nuclear weapons.
Hate Actually
THE DRIVING force of the assault on Iran is Israel.
The surprise attack was launched even as negotiations were taking place between Iran and the Americans.
When Trump hosted the Japanese Prime Minister Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last week, he declared:
Who knows better about surprise than Japan?
Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?
(The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place in 1941.
Trump was born in 1946.)
So what’s the reason for the assault on Iran?
The root cause is Zionist Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
The invasion of Gaza, the pogroms in the West Bank and the attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon are part of Netanyahu’s ambition to create a greater Israel.
And there’s a reason why the vast majority of Israeli Jews support the current attack on Iran.
They have been brainwashed for three quarters of a century — saturated by a propaganda campaign that paints the Palestinians as vermin.
And that the only way to deal with them is by herding them into ghettos and exterminating them in their tens of thousands.
The resistance to Israel’s colonial ambitions comes from Hamas and Hezbollah who are supported by Iran.
That’s Israel’s rationale for the cynical assault on Iran — Netanyahu knew (as did American strategists) that the result would be Iranian retaliation against the Gulf oil states.
He didn’t care — he will do anything to damage Iran, no matter the cost to the world economy.
Trump’s reason is pure vanity.
Lessons from history
IN 1980 Saddem Hussein invaded Iran.
The Iraqi president thought the country, fresh from the turmoil of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution the previous year, would be a pushover.
Hussein was backed by the UK and the USA.
Iran, ironically, was secretly backed by Israel which believed at that time that a prolonged conflict was in its strategic interest.
After eight years and a half a million dead, the war ended with a UN-brokered ceasefire.
The lesson was clear — Iran would be a hard nut to crack.
And it had a century of Western imperialism to strengthen its resolve.
British Petroleum
A BRITISH entrepreneur discovered oil in what was then Persia in 1908.
The company that was to become BP signed a deal with the then Shah which shared control.
But the agreement only gave Persia 16 per cent of the profits.
In 1914 Winston Churchill — then First Lord of the Admiralty — bought control of the British share to secure fuel for the Royal Navy in WW1.
In WW2, Russian and Britain invaded the country — now renamed Iran — and deposed the pro-German Shah.
After the war, a powerful nationalist movement emerged, demanding more democracy — and an end to the foreign control of the country’s oil.
When Mohammad Mosaddegh was appointed prime minister, it looked like the country would seize control of its oil.
A coup — “aided by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom (MI6) and the United States (CIA)” — toppled him to keep the Shah in power.
Iran lost its half share of its oilfields — with the spoils shared mainly between BP and American oil companies.
The Shah’s increasingly repressive regime over the next quarter of a century led to a period of turmoil which allowed Khomeini’s religious block to take over in 1979.
Oil, oil, oil
AFTER A century when the West called the shots on Middle East oil, it’s Iran that’s now in the driving seat.
As long as it has enough rockets and drones, its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz is dominating global oil markets.
And Trump is finding this is a serious threat to his grip on his MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) base.
Cheap petrol — “gas,” as the Americans call it — is one of the touchstones of political life.
Trump has lost control of oil prices — and this, together with the rising cost of living, threatens his control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.
Meanwhile, Iran will exact a high price for bringing the war to an end.
Netanyahu is unmoved by all this, even by the fact that many Israelis are spending their nights in bomb shelters to avoid Iranian rockets.
He sees yet another opportunity for declaring how much of an enemy Iran is and how it must be destroyed.
Even now, there will be strategists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem working out if they can get away with threatening Iran with a nuclear strike unless it capitulates.
Or even using them.
The most dangerous country in the Middle East is Israel.
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